You can find this authoritative ignorance of unknowns in more recent writings too. It's interesting to read a pre-1960s geology book - before continental drift

You can find this authoritative ignorance of unknowns in more recent writings too. It's interesting to read a pre-1960s geology book - before continental drift was proven - and see how they explain continent formation. They'll often present some totally wrong theory without any trace of doubt. Another example is pre-1960s biology books that talk about DNA and give it a bogus role. To be clear, I'm not criticizing these books for not having the answers, or even for being wrong. It's being confidently, authoritatively wrong that is concerning. It also makes me wonder how much of what we read now is also authoritatively wrong. (I have my suspicious about cosmology.) A counterexample is the book "Molecular Biology of the Cell", which is good about explicitly pointing out what is unknown rather than papering over it.