It is too soon to express an opinion on Mrs. Oliphant's new story in Macmillan, of which the first four chapters open the November number, It seems intended to be a novel with a purpose, a tale of the mental, and perhaps physical, struggles of 'a young man of good family and rich expeetations who has fallen in with a socialist reformer, whose opinions he has imbibe—Professor Seeley concludes his series of suggestive papers on History and Polit In this article, which is the best of all, he denounces the ignorance and imperious dictation of the history-reading public who refuse to accept what is not to their taste and who thu: oil and corrupt the work of original investigation, For one fanciful reason or another the public display capricious antipathies to certain historical periods, and more especially to the greater part of recent continental history. A period of Aespotiam is not necessarily unworthy of study, nor vacant of great men—a point which, by the way, is well brought out by Professor von Sybel in his article on the Ancien Régime in last month's Contemporary. This last named paper may profitably be read in direct connexion with Professor Seeley's article. Tame in his Intely issued books on the French Revolution and the causes which led to it, has evidently fallen in with the popular view of the limitation of historical teaching. Professor Sooley's contention is that the student of history must divest himself of all his prepossessions as a practical politician, and treating history as a branch of science investigate every nook and corner of it in the search for new facts without regard to whether they do or do of make for his pet theory whatever it may be. At all events, the present system leaves the modern period of continental history to casual writers who bring no serious criticism to their task, and only profess to furnish amusement.
'A wordy paper by Commander Cameron in further recommendation of an Indo-European Railway as a step towards checkmate ing Russia and controlling Afghanistan through Persia and Arabia, is followed by an Gipsies, from the pen of C. G. Leland. An immense amount of information not only about the Russian Gipsies but about the whole Gipsy race is condensed into this article. Mr. Lelaid identifies the Rumi or Rom with the Dom, a race known to have occupied northern India before the Aryan invasion. To the parent stock were affliated in process of time multitudes of out-easts flung upon the world after every great tribal or religious war, and multitudes too picked up among Persians, Arabs, and less important peoples with whom the original wayfarers from India were brought into contact. A Mathematician's view of the theory of Evolution 1s footle beyond belief. A Mr. Russell (F.R.S.) is the wuther of it. After a sketch of the various forms under which the blood-vascular system is found in the various families of animals, he pro-nominees in favour of the Evolution doctrine or the following ground. It is less probable that the different species were created separately out of inorganic substances by an enormous exertion of force than that they were developed out of approximate forms by an immeasurably less exertion of such force. Truly, feeble advocates are the curse of any theory. How does Mr. Russell know that one is more probable than another?
Both suppositions are A prion equally improbable (or probable). There is no such thing as a human ought-to-be in Nature; we have only to register what there is. But, passing this by, the writer confounds quantity with quality or mode of applica tion, What he wants to declare improbable are catastrophic exertions of force, not enormous exertions. For there is no more force exerted by the earthquake which rends a mountain in twain in a moment, than by the silent stream which eats through it in a century of millenniums.
In the Contemporary, Max Miller shews in a striking manner the advance made in England since 1859, when Mill made his passionate appeal for individual liberty. Nowadays, whatever it may have been a score of years ago, no one is subjected to social or legal punishments except for such actions aware projudicial to the interests of others. That is to say, outside the region of practical morals, no opinion subjects its holder to penalties at the hands of the law or of any portion of society worth considering. The Universities should be, and to a great extent are, the guardians of this freedom of thought and language and this more in England than anywhere else, for in England the Universities govern themselves, whereas on the Continent they are governed. Mill held that the tendency to uniformity in thought, which at a certain stage of a nation's intellectual history is sure to declare itself, is the fruit of a lack of liberty in original research. But Max Miller points out that man is born into the world with his individual freedom trammelled by the centuries which are past and forgotten, and that the intellectual ground on which the nineteenth century man takes his stand is made up of the detritus of thought first thought on the shores of the Oxus, the Euphrates, the Jordan and the Nile. How by suitably arranged and carefully applied systems of education the greatest scope extremely interesting article on The Russiun possible may be given to individual de-! never can ur will do so, and yet to the velopment is the main theme of Professor Miller's paper. Into the details we have not space to enter.—A Liberal and a Conservative have each a turn of! criticism of Mr. Gladstone, if that can be called criticism which in the former is vulgar adulation and in the latter vulgar abuse.—To Professor von Sybel's criticism of Taine's Ancien Régime and Révolution Frangaise we have already alluded. The condition of French Society under Louis XV and Louis XVI with the reciprocal influences of society on the current literature, and of the literature on society, both for good and bad, are excelleutly brought out, Altogether a pre-eminently good paper.—Mr. Robertson produces an array of statistics to prove that the actual condition of Ireland: is by no means hopeless, and has his remedy all cut and dried,—Deluge traditions preserved in all the ancient literatures of the world are treated of in an exhaustive manner by Mr, Lenormant, He concludes that no number of local catastrophics affecting the distinct ancestors of separate races, could account for the universality of deluge traditions, coupled with the resemblances in detail betwoon those preserved in parts of the world the most remote from one another. There must have been one real and terrible event so powerfully impressing the imagination of the first ancestors of our race, as never to have been forgotten by their descendants, This cataclysm must have occurred near the first cradle of mankind, and before the Aisporsion of the families from which the principal races were to spring. The ins ferences affecting current theological and biological doctrines are ubvious.—Apropos of the Australian hoax which set people agog about possibilities of suspending animation in animals, and by inference in men, for an indefinite period, Mr. Proctor, the astronomer, contributes a paper on Suspended Animation, containing nothing new, and probably written against space.—And lastly, Professor Jevons assaults John Stuart Mill's doctrine of Utilitarianism, But to this we will return on a future occasion.
We have loft ourselves little space for a glance at the Nineteenth Century. Roaders in China will tuan first to Mr. Giles's paper on the Book Language of Ohina, from which they will derive little encouragement to attempt an onslaught on the literature of this Empire, as distinguished from eomponitions written in the business and official language.—Bishop Goodwin contribute article on the unity of nature, which will commend itself to all persons who are willing to consider on their merits alone the conflicting theories of modern and ancient days. His general argument is that the laws which we formulate under the title of laws of nature, fail to account for phenomena, either stich as are commonly called miraculous or such as appear purposeless (e.g. the teeth of whales), only because they are not comprehensive enough. Aid he illustrates this by the case of bodies observed to move in a hyperbolic path. He asserts that ''the body cannot, so to speak, get rid of all connection with the unused branch; it has never visited it, it
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.