8o NATURAL SCIENCE. Feb., 



A Little Knowledge. 



It is cheering to note the elevation of the masses by the spread 

 of education. Even your journalist begins to have some glimmerings 

 of a world beyond his own, and, like a child in the arms of his 

 bathing-woman, splashes ineffectually in a sea of unfamiliar words. 

 Monarchs and premiers are laid on the shelf, China and Japan bicker 

 in obscurity, while he, the purveyor of novelties, rushes after that 

 inspired creation of our prince of journalists — " the Pliocene Plesio- 

 saurus." But, of a surety, all these penny-a-liners must now confess 

 themselves conquered by Autolycus. These are some of the delicious 

 sentences in which the erudite trifier of the Pall Mall Gazette intro- 

 duces an article on the chair : — " Primitive man discovered the chair ; 

 not, of course, the chair as we know it, but the embryonic, nucleated 

 chair. With the eye of sympathetic imagination we can see that poor 

 untutored, unenfranchised ancestor of ours at work upon the task of 

 discovering the chair. It is the evening of a day millions of years 

 back ; the deep primaeval forest resounds with the bellowings of the 

 mastodon, the howls of the plesiosaurus, the .squeakings of the 

 ornithorhynchus, and the gibberings of other creatures with names 

 as terrifying as themselves ; and the sun is going down in the west. 

 Our ancestor has been chopping wood and swearing at that blunt 

 stone adze of his." This is charming — but a little inartistic, is it 

 not ? to make the sun set in the west. There is a want of imagination 

 about that statement, little in harmony with nucleated chairs and 

 forest-loving plesiosauri. Seriously to consider it, this is as though 

 Reuter were to inform us that the Queen of Sheba spent a karyokinetic 

 afternoon riding down Broadway on a mammoth, and finished up at 

 Delmonico's with a supper of fried trilobites. The truth and the 

 humour of it are on a level. 



It is to be feared that Autolycus derives his knowledge of pre- 

 historic man, as many self-constituted critics make their sole 

 acquaintance with Ibsen, from the pages of Punch. But we are sure 

 that Mr. E. T. Reed does not, any more than Mr. Anstey, desire his 

 humorous sketches to be regarded as even an approximation to the 

 truth. Nevertheless, Mr. Reed will pardon us if we suggest that his 

 earlier imaginings, such as " A Naval Battle " and " A Slight 

 Difference with the Local Mammoth," were more truly humorous 

 than those later ones in which impossibly post-dated caricatures 

 •" run riot o'er the land." There is a sesquipedalian humour about 

 some of these monsters that is by no means convincing. It really is not 

 right of this ingenious artist to confuse the minds of his public and bis 

 fellow-journalists, and above all to lay such traps for poor Autolycus. 



But perhaps this is hypercriticism. What are a few million 

 years more or less ? " Aliquando bonus dormitat " even Lord Kelvin. 

 And surely a slight mixture of periods is not to be imputed for a fault 

 to those who, like Autolycus and Shakespeare, write " not for an age, 

 but for all time." 



