“There exists a certain work which might afford very profitable reading for the leisure hours of skeptical men of science. It is a book published by Flourens, the Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy, called Histoire des Recherches de Buffon.
The author shows in it how the great naturalists combated and finally conquered the advocates of the facsimile theory; and how they still went on denying everything under the sun, until at times the learned body fell into a fury, an epidemic of negation.
It denied Franklin and his refined electricity; laughed at Fulton and his concentrated steam; voted the engineer Perdormet a strait-jacket for his offer to build railroads; stared Harvey out of countenance; and proclaimed Bernard de Palissy “as stupid as one of his own pots!””
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 