3 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



have mastered their terminology. See, for instance, his very futile and 

 pointless criticism of the term " noumenon," as used hy Mr. Spencer. 

 Upon almost every page of his book we are made to feel that he has 

 never really breathed the same air as the -writers whose names he so 

 continually repeats, and with whose works he professes so minute an 

 acquaintance. He knows them simply as a counsel knows the opposite 

 party in a suit some one of whom he never heard before he got his 

 instructions from his client or client's attorney, and of whom he does 

 not want to hear any more after the trial is over. 



We have tried to do justice to the extreme originality of this writer's 

 methods, but without marked success. The patent laws of most coun- 

 tries, we believe, refuse to grant exclusive rights in connection with 

 mere processes. A man can get a patent for a new kind of spade, but 

 not for a new way of handling an old spade, supposing such were dis- 

 coverable. Well, all we have been able to perceive in the somewhat 

 heavy volume before us is a process, which may indeed strike the au- 

 thor as original with himself, but which strikes us as exceedingly 

 familiar, and as being within very easy reach of any one whose knowl- 

 edge and reasoning faculties are in a sufficiently undeveloped state to 

 permit him to use it. It seems to consist in saying, as often as the 

 evolutionist points to anything as exhibiting marks of relationship 

 with anything else : " Oh, no ! God made that exactly so, by a special 

 act of creation, for wise purposes of his own." Sometimes Mr. Curtis 

 feels sure he can indicate the purposes, and then of course the argu- 

 ment moves triumphantly on ; at other times he acknowledges the 

 purposes to be hidden, and then he falls back, with calm and pious 

 assurance, on the fundamental principle that the Creator, being infinite 

 in wisdom, must have had an infinitely wise end in view in everything 

 that can be traced to his hand. 



"All correct reasoning," says our author, "on the subject of man's 

 descent as an animal begins, I presume, with the postulate of an Infinite 

 Creator, having under his power all the elements and forms of matter, 

 organized and unorganized, animate and inanimate." This declaration 

 gives the key-note of the work, and it perhaps also affords a measure 

 of its philosophical value. To all who are conversant with the use of 

 philosophical terms, it will be evident that the author has but an im- 

 perfect idea of what is commonly meant by a " postulate." lie means 

 by it a principle which he intends to apply to the interpretation of all 

 facts ; others mean by it a principle, the non-recognition of which 

 would render all inquiry impossible. The difference is obvious and 

 important. In the ordinary and legitimate sense of the word "postu- 

 late," the existence of an infinite Creator can not possibly be a post- 

 ulate. It may be considered either as a fact or as a theory. If it is 

 a fact, it does not need to be postulated it is enough to appeal to it ; 

 if it is a theory, you can not postulate it without giving it more au- 

 thority than, as a theory, it ought to have. What we have to do with 



