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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



ral of her, and, having made that concession to 

 Love, plunges immediately fathom deep into mat- 

 ters that he might have discussed with any hu- 

 man being. Piom one passage in his letter, it 

 appears that she had suggested that he should 

 keep her portrait before him while he was writing 

 to her ; and he admits that it is a good idea. But 

 the quality of his letters is not in the slightest 

 degree altered — so far as appears. His writing 

 in these letters has tbe characteristics which his 

 writing in his books, and even his conversation, 

 retained to the last. Sudden dashes at new ideas. 

 Every now and then a fine metaphysical or ethical 

 apcrgu, which is speedily darkened by hazes of 

 Scriptural phraseology, or blocked up by hints 

 of use and service. The ethical element, one might 

 rather say the preaching or homiletic element, is 

 always proving too strong for the pure argumen- 

 tative; and the result is almost as confusing as it 

 is affecting. There is the eagerness of appeal 

 which is so familiar both to his readers and to 

 his friends. "Do you not see?" or its equiva- 

 lent, is repeated in every conceivable key of 

 urgency — and sometimes, truth compels one to 

 say, it is repeated when there is nothing to look 

 at. In a paper contributed to the Lancet, Mr. 

 Hinton's collaboratcur, Dr. Wilks, had some pleas- 

 ant anecdotes to relate. One day, after he had 

 been going on for a long while, " cycle on epi- 

 cycle, orb in orb," he said, eagerly, to Dr. Wilks, 

 "Don't you see?" And when Dr. Wilks an- 

 swered, candidly but respectfully, that he really 

 did not see, Ilinton replied, "Ah! some people 

 never see an inch beyond their noses." In this 

 respect Hinton frequently reminds the watchful 

 reader (who in time becomes the suspicious read- 

 er too) of another man of genius whom in some re- 

 spects he much resembled — Dr. George MacDon- 

 ald. He would give an old truth a new verbal 

 turn, and, lost in the excitement of sudden collat- 

 eral suggestions that the words brought with them, 

 would exhibit all the earnestness proper to the 

 finding of a new truth. 



In spite of this, Hinton had great practical 

 sagacity. In this he resembled Shelley, and some 

 others. As far as his own interests were con- 

 cerned he was liable to frequent betrayal by the 

 hazes which the heat of his own mind threw out ; 

 but he could be singularly clear-headed when he 

 liked. Miss Iladdon seems to have asked him 

 why he called a certain medical man a quack ; 

 and his reply would have done credit to the most 

 logical and impassive man of the world in all the 

 profession. To the last, it was the same with him. 

 And his exquisitely tender conscience always made 



him shrink from pushing matters too far, wheth- 

 er in praise or blame, or in stating rules for the 

 guidance of others. So far as we knew his pro- 

 fessional writing, we had always considered him 

 cautious to a fault ; and we now find from his 

 own words in this volume that he had himself 

 distinctly laid down for himself a course of sys- 

 tematic adherence to the tentative or Socratic 

 method. 



James Hinton's adolescent years and his years 

 of early manhood were very trying to him. He 

 suffered severely in head and heart from what he 

 saw of the world, and his courtship was troubled 

 by doubts of the truth of Christianity on his side. 

 As he was the son of a Christian minister, and 

 peculiarly dear to his mother, and as the young 

 lady whom he afterward married was a Christian, 

 and surrounded by pronounced Christian relation- 

 ships, this was a very painful state of things. The 

 young man's health gave way. His father con- 

 sulted a doctor, who seems to have told him what 

 even Dr. Primrose might have discovered — that 

 James's mind was preying on itself. He recom- 

 mended that the patient should be helped to en- 

 ter the medical profession. It was a great inspi- 

 ration, and the thing was arranged. James made 

 rapid progress in his studies, and very soon be- 

 gan practice. He was associated with Mr. Fisher, 

 and then with Mr. Toynbee, the celebrated aurist, 

 to whose practice he at last succeeded. In a 

 trip to the West Indies, in which he had a large 

 number of negroes under his charge, both afloat 

 and ashore, he showed his quality — and a very 

 fine quality it was — as a working philanthropist ; 

 and the volume contains abundant proofs of his 

 gift of work, though now and then we meet with 

 an eccentricity of opinion. The bent of his mind 

 seems always to have been to " accept" things aa 

 they were, whenever it could be done, and find 

 a motive and a rationale in them. This is very 

 amusingly shown in what he writes about the 

 custom among certain inferior races of handing 

 over the hardest work to the women. It is again 

 patent in the fact that while he rejected the doc- 

 trine of endless future punishment, he found it 

 11 beautiful " to retain the customary phraseology 

 on this subject. The same thing comes to the 

 front, indeed, in his " Mystery of Tain," and in 

 his last new views ; and, we may add, in his 

 Christianity, which may be roughly described as 

 a scheme (only that there is no scheme) of adap- 

 tations or fittings-in — a mosaic of analogical mor- 

 tising ; Biblical sentences being snatched at, aud 

 saturated with what some of his friends called 

 " Ilintonism." He says truly in one of his let- 



