-the method of approaching the centre of Africa by the advancement of successive parallels quicker than that of direct assault. The suggestion of the Bishop of Cape Town was that the countries which bordered on the South African dioceses, and that were already occupied by Christian missions, should be made the basis for fresh operations in the adjoining heathen lands. Livingstone speaks of the Kaffir or Zulu family extending right up to the Zambesi. The occupation of the last South African point would have led, by successive approaches, into the great central region, till the Zambesi itself would have been gained, and a chain of missions and of native mission agents established, from the Cape to the heart of Africa. If this plan should be refused from the apprehended slowness of its results, the entrance from the east, by Zanzibar, lies open to Bishop Tozer, and invites, by its more direct path, to the Central African region and to its newly-discovered world of waters

Whatever be the course chosen, the British Christian community look with hope towards the future operations of this mission. It is entitled to expect, from the united wisdom of the Universities, a mission that shall embody not only the experience that has been gained by its own past failure, but that may be gathered alike from the triumphs and the failures of the missions that have gone before it. Our learned bodies have been slow to move in this great cause, but the later they have entered the field, the larger the volume of experience that lies before them; and who should be abler to read, mark, and inwardly digest its many lessons for the practical guidance of their own enterprise? The track upon which they have entered is studded with lights, and, not less helpful to their course, it is strewn with wrecks. The Christian community does not presume too much when it looks for the "Oxford, Cambridge, Dublin, and Durham Mission" making a wise use of both.

But whether failure or success awaits the new stage on which the mission is about to enter, its first head can never cease to be a living missionary power. If the Universities' mission shall have no other story than his life to tell, its work will not have been in vain. The record of his simple self-dedication, noble unselfishness, heroism without display, cheerfulness under all trials, and singular union of feminine gentleness, with calm energy of will, and loving, unfaltering submission to duty, will yet summon many a soldier to the mission ranks prepared to follow, in self-sacrificing love, the footsteps of CHARLES FREDERICK MACKENZIE. His death is the pledge of the continuance of his mission, the sacrifice out of which there shall yet arise

life to Africa.

Dr Goodwin's "Memoir" of his friend is a model biography.

Relics of the Glacial Epoch in North Britain. 747

It is conceived in a quiet undertone of thought, which is in exquisite harmony with the character and life of Mackenzie. It is a relief to take up the volume, amidst the hero-worshipping sensational biographies that flood the press, in which startling incidents and strained fervours are the substitutes for truth and feeling. Some allowance must be made by the nonepiscopal reader for the importance attached to small matters, great only within the sphere of the episcopal churchman's vision. But on the whole the volume is so moderately church, that we should not envy the state of the reader's mind who did not feel how entirely all subordinate ecclesiastical points are lost in the fulness of its evangelical light, and in the truth and Christian beauty of the life it records.

ART. V.-Relics of the Glacial Epoch in North Britain.

1. Lyell on the Antiquity of Man-Section on Glacial Geology.

2. Darwin on the Origin of Species-Chapter on the Geographical Distribution of Plants during the Glacial Epoch.

3. Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal Papers on Glacial Phenomena— Mr M'Laren, vols. xl., xlii., xlvii.; Mr R. Chambers, vol. liv.

NE of the most curious and significant results of modern

between two departments of knowledge formerly supposed to have nothing in common. Several great and important questions of archæology and history are now included within the wide field of geological investigation, thus adding to the large number of sciences that are based on the history of the earth and its contents. The advocates of Divine revelation having wisely abandoned as untenable the position they originally took up, and yielded the point that the earth has existed for an indefinite period, perhaps millions of ages; it is now demanded by a certain class of geologists, emboldened by this concession, that the existence of the human race for a much longer period than is fixed by the Mosaic chronology, be also recognised as a settled axiom a fact patent to all minds, not to be reasoned about but reasoned from. The battle between Science and the Bible, fought so long and desperately on the oldest fields of geology, has of late years shifted its ground, and is now carried on with redoubled energy along the frontier lines which separate the Adamic epoch from the vast cosmical periods. Human

relics, found associated with bones of extinct animals in gravel and caverns of the latest post-pliocene epoch, are now the missiles which the modern Titans hurl against the Almighty and His Revelation. They snatch the flints of Abbeville from the ground, and surrounding themselves with sparks of their own kindling, strive to dissipate the darkness of those remote ages-beyond the period of the Mosaic record-in which, as they allege, nations and races, that left behind them no other memorials of their existence than these rudely-shaped flints, played their part for long centuries. The impartial spectator must be convinced that the Christian world, in this battle regarding the antiquity of the human race, has by far the best of it. It is as true now as it was of old, though in a different sense, that while the Lord's people have light in their dwellings, there is over the land of Egypt a pall of darkness which may be felt. The account which the Bible gives of the creation of man and the first settlement of the different parts of the earth, is remarkably clear and natural, and the probability of all the circumstances related is not only strong in itself, but is also strikingly corroborated by the names and traditions of the earliest nations. While, on the other hand, the theories built upon the investigations of Perthes, Lyell, and others of that school, plunge us into a state of affairs whose origin is involved in an impenetrable mystery, and where the mind gropes its way, hopeless and aimless, through a chaotic night, where the very light is as darkness. Certain disadvantages, no doubt, have attended the discussion of this leading scientific question of the day. The faith of some easily frightened persons, which rested more upon the outward defences than upon the central vital truths of the Bible, has been very much disturbed, if not altogether destroyed; an unpleasant amount of credulity, very far from complimentary to the wisdom of our age, has been manifested in the scientific as well as in the religious world, and the old saying of Cicero, " Nihil tam absurde dici potest, quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum," has received painful confirmation in the most enlightened period of the world's history. But there is, nevertheless, one compensation connected with it, for which we should be grateful. All wars, by concentrating popular interest upon the localities where they are carried on, have a tendency to spread geographical knowledge. In this manner our acquaintance with India, the Crimea, North America, and Denmark, has been greatly extended of late years, and the humblest peasant now knows the names and situations of places of which, previous to recent wars, he was profoundly ignorant. And so the battle fought at present between geology and revelation on the post-tertiary

General View of Subject.

749

epoch, has concentrated public attention upon a region formerly most obscure to the scientific man, and almost entirely unknown to the general reader; and the consequence has been a considerable increase to our knowledge of comparatively recent revolutions of the earth's surface, which, the more they are studied and understood, the more we are persuaded they will be found, not to militate against, but to confirm, the statements of Scripture. There is one portion of the geological system, viz. the icy-drift and boulder-clay formation, concerning which, owing to this cause, our information has of late years been greatly enlarged. This epoch is one of the first of those numerous successive steps by which we are conducted in tracing the history of the past, and being the first, and that which involves fewest and smallest changes, "it is equally important in guiding our judgment, and interesting as shewing better than any other the method and prevailing law of nature in the progressive history of creation." The so-called facts brought forward by geological investigation in gravel and caverns, and forming the only sources of information from which conclusions regarding the long duration of the human race have been derived, belong principally to this period. In manuals of geology there are only a few paragraphs devoted to the elucidation of this important period, but a great deal of most valuable and interesting information upon the subject is scattered in the transactions of learned societies, and in the pages of scientific journals, not easily accessible to the ordinary reader. In the following pages we intend to give a popular resumé of the facts recently brought to light regarding the ancient existence of glaciers in the mountain regions of the British Isles, and to give such an account of the more prominent peculiarities of the glacial period, as may qualify the reader, who has not previously studied the subject, to enter into the minute and technical details connected with the question of the antiquity of the human race. We shall confine our survey to Scotland, where more almost than in any other part of Northern Europe, the peculiar phenomena of ancient glacial action may be seen in the most striking and concentrated form. With the religious views of the authors of the works placed at the head of this paper, we are of course far from sympathising; but, regarding them as among the greatest authorities on the purely physical questions connected with the glacial epoch, we are willing to accept their facts, without the lame and inconsequent conclusion deduced from them. Upon the same principle which determined Luther to adapt profane music to the service of the sanctuary, we gladly avail ourselves of all the light shed by such able expositors of physical science, to direct us along a