B TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. IN OCTOBER. I SAW the sunlight glinting down, I saw the soft pathetic light AT EVENTIDE. OFTTIMES when all the storm-vexed day For peace at last; Touch the stream's foam to glistering white. Lo! as if rolled by hand of might, I saw the tearful lustre shed, I heard the music that they make And toss the withered fern-fronds by, I heard the river's ceaseless song, The chirpings of each lingering bird And a fresh yearning woke and cried, And all the lovely autumn day, Macmillan's Magazine. AD MUSAM. Aside the gloom of cloud is pressed, And quiet rest. Thus, too, beyond our doubt and strife, With sombre night, Awaits a calm and peaceful eve. DREAMS. A. J. P. A DREAM flew out of the ivory gate A dream came out from the gate of horn I ran to the stable and saddled my steed, speed; O MAID, that, far from town's tumultuous strife, When I reached my love the sun shone bright, Beneath the healthy blue, Gathering fresh flowers of every varied hue, The nightingale when singing to the night, Oft sees thy upturned face The whistling ploughman, with his brawny On his stopped ploughshare, stands, To hear thy sudden song, And see the flutter of thy garments white O come, sweet nymph, and make a home with Yet for all this, their beauty is not marred, Hindscarth Cairn, August 30th. Spectator. From The Contemporary Review. NATURAL SELECTION AND NATURAL THEOLOGY. It would be a sorry spectacle to behold a posse of scientific agnostics, fired with zeal against superstition, arming themselves with the costly implements of scientific research to make a furious onset on Westminster Abbey; piling the treasures of museums in an incendiary heap, flinging choice fossils, microscopes, and electrical apparatus through the windows; or employing a twenty-foot reflector as a battering-ram. Whatever temporary damage the venerable building might suffer, it is certain that the injury would be much more serious to the interests of science, and to the assailants themselves. true domain. A great deal conventionally passes under the name, which is no more science than bricks and timber are a building. It is art, the art of making science. The facts patiently accumulated, accurately analyzed and recorded, on which, step by step, scientific inductions are raised, are the precious materials of science; but they are not science. The keen eye of the naturalist, the adroit and sensitive finger of the operator; the insight, imagination, and ready invention which mark the man of scientific genius from the mere plodder, and enable him to look behind the veil before he persuades nature herself to lift it: these are admirable, invaluable, indispensable to the progress of science. But they are not Grotesque as this supposition may be, science. Theories and hypotheses the we are compelled to witness a really more shelves on which we pack and label our lamentable and surprising spectacle, when | facts, the luggage-vans in which we forthose rich results of modern science ward them on their journey which are the wonder and lustre of our age, and those bold theories which are the feelers which science puts out into the unknown future, are employed by writers of cultured ability, not to deepen men's reverence and feed and quicken what is noblest in man's nature, but to blind his intellect in its heavenward gaze, and loosen his grasp on the unseen, the eternal, the divine. A class of thinkers have arisen, not endowed with any overplus of modesty, who (so far as their writings enable us to judge) value science chiefly as a weapon with which to assail religion. A plainspoken protest (it seems to me) is needed, in the name of science as truly as in the name of religion, against this perversion of its triumphs and its authority to a purpose utterly alien from its true spirit. For the lessons of science are yet more precious than her gifts. She has given us much and has more in store. But her gifts would be bought too dear if the price were the impoverishment of our spiritual nature and bankruptcy of faith. Cultivators of science, I take leave to professors and amateurs alike are among the most useful implements of scientific discovery. But they are not science. Above all, the dicta of individual scientists, how eminent soever, are not science. To claim for what at best can but rank as "pious opinions" the authority of infallible dogma, is both disloyal to truth and perilous to intellectual freedom. For, be it remembered, liberty of thought a phrase which often stands for much liberty but little thought—is inconsistent with science. Where science begins liberty ends. Any one is at liberty either to think that two ultimate atoms of matter can occupy the same space, or to think that they are impenetrable, mutually excluding one another. This liberty results from our present ignorance. But no one is at liberty to think that the angles of a plane triangle can be less than two right angles, or that they can be greater; because we certainly know them to be equal. Liberty of thought is not even the path, of which science is the goal. It is simply the throwing down of all hedges and walls, and banishment of all threatening notices, think watch-dogs, patrols, and man-traps, whereare doing not a little to loosen its author-by our right to explore the waste was ity, and especially to imperil if not destroy limited; so that we are free to make our its educational value, by neglecting to own path as the stars guide us. But we draw the boundary line sharply round its take our own risk of bogs and precipices. Doubt may unlock the fetters of tradition, | any sane man by asking him which he and start us, with its sharp spur deep in chooses; we feel that such language our heart, in quest of truth. But it might be justifiable even praiseworthy guides us no step of the way; and in pres- regarding a question of practical moence of ascertained truth it expires. The rality, but that is grievously out of place freedom of inquiry, and of provisional in the region of abstract truth. When, belief or disbelief, which is the condition again, encouraged by such an example, of honestly working out a scientific de- the writer of what purports to be a scienduction or induction, becomes irrational tific exposition of Darwinism not only when once the result is known. Much tells his readers that if they don't agree nonsense about intellectual liberty might with him it is because they are weakhave been spared, if people would bear in minded, but declares that if he is mismind the obvious fact that free thought taken the blame lies with the Creator for and science are mutually inconsistent. having so constructed the universe as to The one supposes the absence of the mislead him, we feel that it would be well other. Hence the immense importance if he could be made to understand that of not anticipating science by erecting he has sinned as much against the laws into dogma the theories, conjectures, or of scientific argument as against those of personal opinions of scientific leaders. decency. 66 When, for example, we are told in a Akin to these unwholesome and illegithandbook of physical geography that imate methods of dealing with scientific we now know" that the primitive an- thought for purposes outside the scope of cestors of the present human race led for science, is the device of representing the thousands of years the life of wild beasts defenders of either natural or revealed in the forests, the opinion of certain an- theology as living in a state of hysterical thropologists is illegitimately presented terror at the march of science. They are to the learner as an integral part of the supposed to "shriek" at each fresh beam body of established fact. The grounds of light, and to wink all the harder, like of this opinion (such as they are) ought bats into whose cave the unwelcome sun to be fairly stated; and, at the same time, is peering. The "shrjeks" are, in fact, the learner ought to be made aware, that as imaginary as the danger. Nothing is the most ancient human remains yet dis- more peacefully certain than that truth covered present a form and development can never war with truth. There was a of skull utterly inconsistent with the no- teacher, more than eighteen hundred tion that the possessors of those skulls years ago, who said to the students in lived the life of monkeys. Were such his school, "Ye shall know the truth, and an opinion unanimously voted by a pan- the truth shall make you free." Those anthropological congress, it would not who reckon themselves his disciples thereby be constituted a part of science. should be the last men to dread the ad. It would still be competent to any in-vance of truth in any possible direction. structed person to say: "Your opinion Rather, they may well believe that the seems to me at variance with the facts." lowliest truth is akin to the highest. And if his protest were simply hooted Even the story of an earthworm's life, down as a piece of intolerable presump- truly told, may teach lessons of divine tion in the face of such a phalanx of ex- philosophy. perts, science would no more sanction such an assertion of authority than it sanctioned the burning of Giordano Bruno or the dogma of papal infallibility. When, again, an eminent professor is quoted as saying, with reference to the hypothesis of organic evolution : "Choose your hypothesis; I have chosen mine; and I will not run the risk of insulting It Protest, however, counts for little. may even do mischief, if it be misinterpreted as the refuge of those who have been silenced in argument, as beaten players are wont to accuse their antagonists of unfair play. It may be replied to the charge of profaning and degrading science, that to explode falsehood is to aid truth; and that since all truth is akin, 'to get rid of religious superstition must | formation of each species, may have been It is astonishing that a writer of keen intelligence could pen this last sentence without asking himself, Is it not possible that slow evolution, and not independent is an ambiguous and cursory phrase, "covering the facts" in more senses than one-disguising rather than describing; because the adaptation is not single, but multifold. If "environment be taken in the wide sense of the universal conditions of life (as heat, light, grav 46 en ment than another. Without such adapta- |