done by a republican than by a monarchical or imperial form of government.

Mr. Lowell, though he weeps over the prophet of Chelsea, is generously alive to his literary greatness: "With all deductions, Carlyle remains the profoundest critic and the most dramatic imagination of modern times." And again: "As a purifier of the sources whence our intellectual inspiration is drawn, his influence has been second only to that of Wordsworth—if even to his." There is something much more living and personal about Mr. Lowell's account of Emerson: that great magician, who seems to dispense so naturally with the definite props of rule and doctrine so essential to most men, because he is so inseparably wedded to the eternal harmonies as never to feel any of them external to himself that sweet and lofty prophet, who, with piercing yet indulgent eye, above all pain, yet pitying all distress, tells us what we know, and gives us the possession of ourselves that equable temperament, that cloudless serenity whose calm is infectious, and whose deep peace puts everything into proportion; though personally Mr. Lowell prefers a temple (unlike those vast Mexican mysteries of architecture) with a door left for the god to come in-yet he knows that the root of the matter is in Emerson, who is never out of the presence of the " Oversoul," and whose one temple is the round world and the over-arching heaven. To be conformable to eternal law is to be religious-to be natural on the plane of a high and pure nature—to be radiant with the original righteousness which draws the love and reverence of humankind and makes life adorable, instead of for ever struggling with the nightmare of original sin. This, if anything, is to be prophetic. This, in spite of what Emerson calls " the dear old devil," is the witness to the world that "God has breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life, and man has become a living soul." "What an antiseptic is a pure life!" exclaims one who has watched and reverenced Emerson from boyhood. "At sixty-five, he had that privilege of soul which abolishes the calendar, and presents him to us always the unwonted contemporary of his own prime; we who have known him so long, wonder at the tenacity with which he maintains himself in the outposts of youth." The brief essay before us is little more than a warm tribute to Mr. Emerson as a lecturer. We are told that he is still an unfailing "draw" in America, but we are told something else -that he is a consummate master of the lecture-art. Will our eminent men ever, as a rule, think it worth while to acquire this art? Not so long as 10 is considered an adequate fee for the best lecture, whilst £50 or £100 is willingly given for the best VOL. CCXLVII. NO. 1799.

song. The old country is far behind the new in its estimation of high-class scientific and literary merit. Platform lecturing is an art like any other; and England will never get good lecturers till she pays for them. Pray, what sort of fiddling can you get for nothing? Lowell's essay on Emerson is-what I hope these two papers on Lowell will prove to be-a way of referring readers to the fountainhead, more than an analysis of the waters that flow from it. Personally, like so many others, to Emerson I owe my freedom and emancipation from those Stocks of prejudice and those Pillories of public opinion which make so many sit in the world of thought like frightened criminals unable or afraid to stir. When I was at college I exchanged four handsome volumes of Montaigne for one volume of Emerson's Essays. I have never regretted my bargain; and when I open my well-worn copy, I still find the Pantheon and the Forest Primeval alike instinct with the great Oversoul, and vocal with the music of God.

I think I can do no better than close this brief estimate of James Russell Lowell-his literary performance, together with such flashes of personality as leap forth spontaneously from its manysided facets-with these words of his great friend and master, words fitly applicable to the few men who have measured their own time with temperate eyes-the few workers who have made their own country better and greater-" the few souls that have made our souls wiser": "The world is his who can see through its pretensions. . . The day is always his who works in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon."

H. R. HAWEIS.

EVOLUTION & GEOLOGICAL TIME.

Ο

NE of the commonest accusations brought against the new evolutionist philosophy is that so tersely summed up by Mr. Martineau in his succinct charge of "mincing causation and drawing largely upon time." Most people find it difficult to conceive that the past history of the earth has been of sufficient duration to produce all the variety of animal and vegetable life which we see around us, by the slow action of natural selection alone. The numerous writers who have been at the pains of "answering" or "confuting" Mr. Darwin and Mr. Herbert Spencer with more or less arrogance and success-the former as a rule varying inversely with the latter-have generally insisted upon this chronological argument with a zeal which often far outruns their knowledge. Thus, one may frequently see it objected that if the evolution hypothesis were true, the succession of animal types should be gradual and orderly, the lowest forms being. found in the oldest strata, and the higher forms following them in a regular progression, till they culminate in the existing fauna ;"whereas," it is constantly urged, "we actually find in the Paleozoic rocks, which are the very oldest of all, the five principal groups of protozoa, annuloids, articulates, molluscs, and vertebrates, living side by side, and differing as widely from one another as they do at the present day." This very specious fallacy is rendered plausible by its carefully muddled statement of the facts, which, while literally and separately true, are so put together as to convey a totally false impression. If we begin by pointing out its errors and omissions, we may pave the way for an exposition of the support which geology, rightly understood and rationally interpreted, really affords to the theory of evolution.

In the first place, nothing could be more misleading than the employment of the term "Paleozoic rocks" in such a sense as that given to it by the above quotation. For the impression conveyed would certainly be that the Paleozoic rocks were one single formation, the earliest with which we are acquainted. But, as a matter of fact,

the vast series of formations so designated comprises a total thickness of strata equal to at least three-fourths of all the known fossiliferous deposits. It is marked off from the far smaller and less chronologically important groups of the Secondary and Tertiary rocks, not because it covers an approximately equal lapse of geological time, but simply and solely for convenience of stratigraphical classification. As we shall see more fully hereafter, the Paleozoic period probably occupied double or treble as long a time as the Secondary and Tertiary periods put together. So that any argument based upon the occurrence or non-occurrence of particular plants or animals in the Paleozoic system is utterly futile, unless it specifies distinctly whether it refers to the earliest Cambrian or the latest Carboniferous deposits-the relics of two periods apparently separated from one another very much more widely than we ourselves are separated from the days of the Chalk and the Blue Lias. It is, in short, as though one were first arbitrarily to divide English history into three epochs-the Primitive period, including all times between the landing of Hengst and the reign of Elizabeth, the Stuart period, and the Hanoverian period-and then to argue that English literature can never have undergone any progressive development, because in the primitive or very earliest of these three epochs it had already produced Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bacon, and Spenser. Absurdities and incongruities not less ridiculous than these have been gravely put forward as solemn refutations of Darwinism by more than one distinguished but ungeological writer.

Again, while it is perfectly true that we do find the remains of vertebrates somewhere about the middle of the Paleozoic seriesthat is to say, in the Upper Silurian, underlaid by forty thousand feet of previous fossiliferous rocks-the statement is once more very misleading by its studious generality and dishonest avoidance of detail. For the vertebrates whose remains we thus discover are fishes, the very lowest and simplest class of all their group. The amphibians do not appear with certainty before the Carboniferous period, at the very close of the great Paleozoic series, in comparatively recent times. The first true reptiles are found in the Permian, and they attained their highest development in the all but modern Secondary epoch. Birds are not known till the Jurassic times-the day-before-yesterday of geology. And mammals have never yet made their appearance before the new red sandstone, while it is only in the still soft and claylike mud of the very recent Tertiary epoch that their most important and familiar forms find a full development. The geological record bears out in minute detail the very smallest particulars of the Darwinian theory.

Finally, it is quite forgotten by those who argue in this superficial fashion that we have still under our eyes the sedimentary deposits of a vast and very ancient epoch, the Laurentian, underlying all our known fossiliferous strata, and testifying to an immense lapse of primæval time in which the traces of animal and vegetable life are few and very doubtful. The vast ages thus unaccounted for would be amply sufficient, as we hope to show, for the development of the primitive fauna and flora up to the point at which we find it when the book of palæontology abruptly opens its first chapter with the teeming and diversely peopled seas of the Cambrian age.

Where such wide misconceptions exist or such strange misrepresentations are made, it may be worth while to meet them by a definite statement of the real facts, so far as they concern the evolutionist hypothesis. I propose, accordingly, in the present paper to give an approximate chronology of geological time, based upon such indications as the various strata have afforded to the greatest investigators of our own or recent days. Geologists, as a rule, it is true, have avoided making any definite statements as to the exact number of years which any particular deposit may be supposed to represent; and they have done so on very good and sufficient grounds. There is always a danger that such calculations, however vague, may be upset by further discoveries; and scientific men generally refrain from inferences which new facts may at any moment invalidate. But when the absence of such approximate chronological tables is made the ground for fallacious arguments by the unscientific, who twist aside geological terms so as to give countenance to very dubious reasoning, it is well to step aside somewhat from this wholesome principle, and to place the question at issue before the general public in its most vivid, graphic, and definite light. For this purpose, I propose here to estimate roughly the time occupied by the deposition of the best known formations, and then to point out the relative date of the first remains which mark the earliest known appearance of the chief animal or vegetable groups upon our earth. Such a chronology, extending over unknown millions of years, must of course be highly conjectural and full of acknowledged lacuna; but it will at least serve to place the subject before the reader in a clear and comprehensible form, while it will correct numerous intentional or accidental misrepresentations which occur only too often in the pages of controversial authors.

We must begin by fixing upon some arbitrary period of so many millions of years, representing the total of geological time, which we may divide out proportionately among the various formations ac