against both morals and manners when it is trumpeted abroad in a work of this kind. Already mutterings of disquiet, annoyance, and vexation are heard from some of these unprotected people. Having said this, let us give a very succinct analysis of the work. The first part is a biography of his father, written many years ago, when he had just died. Though brief, it is a complete account of his parentage. The sketch of his grandfather, whose name he bore, is very interesting. Nothing could exceed the reverence and admiration of Carlyle for his father. Our readers will appreciate the words we quoto: 'He was a man of perhaps the very largest natural endowment of any man it has been my lot to converse with. None of us will ever forget that bold glowing style of his, flowing free from his untutored soul, full of metaphor-though he knew not what a metaphor was, with all manner of potent words, which he appropriated and applied with a surpassing accuracy you would not often guess whence-brief, energetic, and which, I would say, conveyed the most perfect picture, definitely clear, not in ambitious colours, but in full white sunlight, of all the dialects I have listened to. Never again shall we hear such speech as that was.' The second reminiscence is of Edward Irving. How closely these two dissimilar men were related we have already seen. His words here are worth quoting: From the first we honestly liked one another, and grew intimate, nor was there ever while we both lived any cloud of grudge between us, or of an interruption of our feelings for a day or hour. Blessed conquest of a friend in this world.' In their young days they travelled, boated, walked together, discussing all questions of literature, theology, religion, &c. The account of their walk from Kirkcaldy up the Forth side to Stirling, through the Trossachs, up the side of Loch Lomond, and their visit to Drumclog, is equal in picturesqueness and power to anything Carlyle ever wrote. He speaks of Irving's 'grand forest avenues of sermons, with their multifarious outlooks to the right and left.' Many noted names turn up in this section. De Quincey, 'a pretty little creature, full of wiredrawn ingenuities, bankrupt enthusiasm, bankrupt pride, a poor, finestrung, weak creature, launched into the literary career of ambition, and mother of dead dogs.' Chalmers is spoken of as being of 'infinitely less thoughts than Irving, but taking far more pains in setting them forth. With such an intellect, professing to be educated, yet so illread, so ignorant of all that lay beyond the horizon in place or time, as I have almost never met with . . . yet a preacher whose like there will never be, I suppose, in any Christian church.' The other names we pass by in order to note the second volume. Here we meet with

Jeffrey, who occupies some sixty pages. Early in their intercourse, Carlyle says: I found him infinitely witty, ingenious, sharp of fence, but not in any sense deep; and without difficulty held my own." Again, at bottom I did not find his the highest kind of insight in regard to any province whatever. . . On all subjects I had to refuse him the title of deep.' That sketch of Jeffrey's mimicking public speakers in their parlour at Craigenputtock once read can never be forgotten. But the greater part of this volume is occupied with reminiscences of Mrs. Carlyle, and they are infinitely touching and tender. The love of the old man for his gifted wife, who was his best friend and his good angel for forty years, and his utter desolation at his loss when she died, is intensely pathetic. She was a brave, bright woman, who, as a child, insisted on learning Latin like a boy, with whom every one admitted to her intimacy fell straightway in love, from Edward Irving to Lord Jeffery. That she bore much from her husband's fits of dourness and dyspeptic ill-humours, and disguised her pain because she would not give him pain, and sacrificed herself to him, is all true beyond dispute, and excites strongest admiration for her name. At the close we have notes upon Southey and Wordsworth. He only partially appreciates the latter, sees him as a rather dull, hard-tempered, unproductive, and almost wearisome kind of man; as a poet, he is an honest rustic fiddle, good and well handled, but wanting two or more strings.' The survey of Southey is more favourable, but has the sting of one unpleasant personal or rather domestic reference. Many wellknown persons are hit off in this volume in Carlyle's characteristic and often unpleasant manner. Miss Martineau had considerable talent, which would have made her a shining matron of some big female establishment or mistress of some immense dress-shop, but totally inadequate to grapple with deep spiritual and social questions, into which she launched nothing doubting.' The truth is, he disliked the class of literary or celebrated scribbling women.' John Stuart Mill's wife, then Mrs. Taylor, so idolised by Mill as the pink of all perfection, as readers of his Autobiography and the dedication to the treatise on Liberty will remember, he describes as a very will-o'thewispish iridescence of a creature, meaning nothing bad either.' Of Darwin's origin of species he had no high opinion: 'It is wonderful to me as indicating the capricious stupidity of mankind; could not read it or waste the least thought upon it.' His judgment upon Robert Hall, the prince of modern preachers, is harsh and unkindly; but perhaps the worst literary judgment in the work is that pronounced upon Charles Lamb, who has delighted so many minds and

gladdened so many hearts by his essays and letters. Lamb's outer man is graphically set forth: 'He was the leanest of mankind, having black breeches, buttoned to the knee and no further, surmounting spindle legs, also in black fallana, head-finish, black, bony, lean, and of a Jew type rather; in the eyes a kind of smoky brightness or confused sharpness; spoke with a stutter; in walking tottered and shuffled, emblem of inability, bodily and spiritually, something of real insanity.' All this may pass; but, when he speaks of Lamb's wondrous ignorance, his ghastly make-believe wit, the slender fibre of actual worth in him, &c., we are compelled, in the face of the facts of his life, and in face of the judgment of well-read people, to say that this oracular deliverance is as void of charity as it is unsupported by evidence, and we can only lay it at the door of the dyspeptic fits which affected his temper and not unfrequently clouded his powerful mind. There are few things finer in these Reminiscences than his description of the introduction of a 'Sister of Charity,' a nun, into his house to nurse his wife during an illness. She soon tried her hand at converting her patient, which led to her summary ejection from the house. Upon this he remarks that this event threw suddenly a glare of strange and far from pleasant light over the sublime Popish Sister of Charity'

movement.'

Having reached the limits of our space, we will, before laying down our pen, quote the wise words of one who knew Carlyle, and whose judgment is of acknowledged value in literary questions :--

What Hazlit said of Coleridge was true of him. He cast a great stone into the pool of contemporary thought, and the circles have grown wider and wider. He was early enough in the field to deal the last blows to expiring Byronism. It was his fortune to be for most educated Englishmen the discoverer of the literature of Germany. In what state did he find literary criticism here? What did it not become under his hand? How many heaps of dry bones in history have been quickened and made to rise and walk? How many skeletons have been clothed with flesh at his touch? And yet in all his varied activity, from first to last, he was something of an inspired peasant. The waves of London life came up to and about him, but they never overwhelmed him or altered him one jot. With all his culture, and nearly fifty years' residence in the south, he was to the end substantially unchanged; his ways were his forefathers' ways; his deepest convictions were akin to theirs; and it needed but a little stretch of the imagination to suppose him a fellow-worker with Knox, or the friend and companion of Burns.

L. R.

HH

VI.—THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND THE

ORIGIN OF SPECIES.

AMONG the numerous books and articles constantly inviting the attention of readers to the subjects of evolution and the antiquity and origin of man some are rather of an argumentative and polemical character than of the nature of original investigation; others relate to new facts, and constitute actual contributions to the data of questions as yet too scantily supplied with fundamental truths. Of the former class many are interesting, able, and suggestive; but it is on works of the second-class that the actual settlement of these disputes must depend, though, in the meantime, this may be comparatively unknown to the general reader, whose ideas as to the present state of these questions are likely to be derived rather from the confident assertions and well-put arguments of popular writers than from the more solid, though less showy and far less startling and less-assured, conclusions of actual painstaking works.

Of works which may claim to contain results of original and useful investigation the following, which are now in the hands of scientific men and embrace a very wide range of inquiry, may afford the material for profitable discussion:-Dawkins on Early Man in Britain is a work limited in its range, but embracing the results of the investigations of an acute observer well up in the paleontology of the more recent formations. Barrande's Brachiopodes, extracted from the great work on the Silurian System of Bohemia, is the production of the first paleozoic paleontologist of our age, and with regard to the group to which it relates, as well as to the cephalopods and trilobites previously treated by the author in the same manner, is an exhaustive inquiry as to what they have to say for and against Evolution. Les Enchaine ments du Monde Animal, by Gaudry, may be regarded as a popular book; but it is the work of one of the most successful collectors and expositors of the Tertiary mammalia. Le Monde des Plantes, by Saporta, is also, in some degree, popular in its scope, but is replete with scientific facts admirably put together by a most successful and able paleo-botanist. Of the above writers Barrande is an uncompromising opponent of Evolution as ordinarily held. In other words, he finds that the facts of the history of life in the Paleozoic period

lend no countenance to this hypothesis. The others are theistic evolutionists, holding the doctrine of derivation with more or less of modification, but not descending to the special pleading and one-sided presentation of facts so common with the more advanced advocates of the doctrine. Perhaps we may most clearly present the salient points brought out in these works by noticing, first, the successive Tertiary periods and their life, culminating in the introduction of man, and, secondly, the facts as to the introduction of those earlier creatures which swarmed in the Paleozoic seas.

The Tertiary, or Kainozoic, period, the last of the four great times' into which the earth's geological history is usually divided, and that to which man and the mammalia belong, was ingeniously subdivided by Lyell on the ground of percentages of marine shells and other invertebrates of the sea. According to this method, which, with some modification in details, is still accepted, the Eocene, or dawn of the recent, includes those formations in which the percentage of modern species of marine animals does not exceed 3, all the other species found being extinct. The Miocene (less recent) includes formations in which the percentage of living species does not exceed thirty-five, and the Pliocene (more recent) contains formations having more than thirty-five per cent. of recent species. To these three may be added the Pleistocene, in which the great majority of the species are recent, and the Modern, in which all may be said to be living. Dawkins and Gaudry give us a division substantially the same with Lyell's, except that they prefer to take the evidence of the higher animals instead of the marine shells. The Eocene thus includes those formations in which there are remains of mammals, or ordinary land quadrupeds, but none of these belong to recent species or genera, though they may be included in the same families and orders with the recent mammals. This is a most important fact, as we shall see, and the only exception to it is that Gaudry and others hold that a few living genera, as those of the dog, civet, and marten are actually found in the later Eocene. In the case of plants, as we shall find, Saporta shows that modern genera of land plants occur before the Eocene, in the last great group of the preceding period, and we have abundant American evidence of the same fact. As in the Mosaic narrative of creation, the higher plants precede by a long time the higher animals. The Miocene, on the same mammalian evidence, will include formations in which there are living genera of mammals, but no species which survive to the present time. The Pliocene and Pleistocene show living species, though in the former these are very few and exceptional, while in the datter they become the majority.