Michael Baier wrote:


> http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/05/02/life.evolution.reut/index.html
>
> Evolution on trial in Kansas May 2, 2005 Posted: 12:20 PM EDT (1620 GMT)
>
> TOPEKA, Kansas (Reuters) -- Evolution is going on trial in Kansas.
>
> Eighty years after a famed courtroom battle in Tennessee pitted religious
> beliefs about the origins of life against the theories of British
> scientist
> Charles Darwin, Kansas is holding its own hearings on what school children
> should be taught about how life on Earth began.
====

I have a book entitled "Universal History, from the Creation of the World to
the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century" by Lord Woodhouselee, which avoids
the subject of Darwin and Evolution altogether. In this case it is
acceptable because it was published in MDCCCXLVII (or in the new metric time
units 1847), which is twelve years before Darwin published "The Origin of
Species".

Unfortunately, I've only got Volume the Fourth (of six), so I don't know how
Lord Woodhouselee deals with the early years. The volume that I have deals
with the period a little after Christ and seems a bit obsessed with "the
downfall of paganism and rise of Christianity".

There seems to be a bit of a bias in the tone. For instance, the rise of
Mahomet is described:
"A small park of superstition kindling, in the meantime, in the heart of
Arabia, produced a new religion, and a new empire, which arose to a very
high degree of splendour. To that quarter, therefore, we now turn our
attention, to mark the rise of the Mahometan superstition, and the
foundation of the empire of the Sarecens."

It describes the geography of the area as:
 "Arabia Petraea, which, as its name implies, is a barren and rocky
country, . Arabia Deserta, so named for the sandy deserts with which it
abounds,"

There is no mention of oil reserves. :-)

"They had a confused tradition, that they were descended from the Patriarch
Abraham; and they retained, of the Jewish religion, the ceremony of
circumcision, ablutions, and the horror of certain meats, which they
regarded as unclean. With these rites, they combined the worship of idols,
and the belief of three godesses of equal power and wisdom, and co-existent
with the Supreme Being."


Googling Lord Woodhouselee turned up that he was the guy attributed to say:

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
These nations have progressed through the following sequence:
From Bondage to Spiritual Faith
From Spiritual Faith to Great Courage
From Courage to Liberty
From Liberty to Abundance
From Abundance to Selfishness
From Selfishness to Complacency
From Complacency to Apathy
From Apathy to Dependency
From Dependency back into Bondage"
--- most commonly attributed to
     "The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic"
     by Alexander Fraser Tytler Lord Woodhouselee (1748-1813)
     (Scottish judge and historian at Edinburgh University)

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