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TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTELY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



memoir, and to others, are intensely affecting. 

 The pen pauses before venturing to put down 

 the mournful end of so much noble labor. Mr. 

 Hinton had overworked his brain. When he 

 got out to the Azores he found that he had been 

 misled as to the value of the property, and, in- 

 deed, that he might have to return to the prac- 

 tice of his profession. He met this blow with 

 sad, wise, sweet, and altogether noble resigna- 

 tion ; but his work in this life was done, and he 

 died at St. Michael's, of brain-fever, on the 16th 

 of December, 1875. 



James Hinton came of a long-lived strain on 

 the side of both parents ; but he was too heavily 

 weighted for a long life of his own. He took to 

 ideas with the passion of the poet, and more than 

 the passion of most poets, for the fires of con- 

 science and self-sacrifice were always at white 

 heat within him. Troubles and wrong?, which 

 were in common speech no concern of his, con- 

 sumed him with pity or indignation, or both. In 

 addition to this, his heart was not in the work 

 he had to do as a professional man, but in the 

 work he never had time to do. The sins and 

 sorrows of the world around him he felt the most 

 acutely in the direction of his tenderest suscepti- 

 bilities. He said of himself that his desire for 

 human welfare exceeded in its intensity the sum 

 of all his other desires, and it was very largely 

 through his love and reverence for women that 

 the wrongs and sufferings which give us all the 

 heart-ache now and then hit him hardest. He was 

 not, at first glance, an enthusiastic, sensitive-look- 

 ing man — though he had an eager outlook. We 

 never attended a meeting on any woman's question, 

 educational or other, without meeting James Hin- 

 ton. No stranger who saw him steaming along 

 the street on the way to such a gathering would 

 have supposed that he was on such an errand. 

 Very likely the nap of his hat was brushed the 

 wrong way ; he wore no gloves ; and he probably 

 had a book under his arm : on the whole he 

 looked, to a superficial observer, like a perfectly 

 commonplace clerk to a bookseller, or something 

 of that sort. There was an improvised look about 

 him, and an indescribable mixture of absence of 

 mind and presence of mind. In spite of his in- 

 tentness of eye and attitude, he always looked as 

 if he had just dropped in to a place out of curi- 

 osity, and was just ready to hurry out again. His 

 eye saw — but only what it wanted there and then 

 to see. It was by no means easy to catch it — so 

 intent was he on what was going forward. The 

 last time we saw him was at a meeting on a 

 woman's question : and he looked as if he fully 



believed the prophecy of the millennium that a 

 certain lady speaker was delivering. Of course, 

 however, he was sane enough in his expectations 

 of human nature when he had taken time to 

 think a little. No man more so. 



Sir W. W. Gull, who was for twenty years an 

 intimate friend of Mr. Hinton's, has prefixed to 

 the memoir a few introductory pages, in which he 

 supplies the new-comer with some useful general 

 ideas about his friend's theories. Sir W. W. 

 Gull had offered in 1857 to bring out " Man and 

 his Dwelling-Place," at his own risk, if necessary. 

 It is not a book in which he himself could take 

 any interest of intellectual sympathy ; except, we 

 presume, so far as it tended to abolish distinc- 

 tions between organic and inorganic. Nor, in- 

 deed, can we : though it went into a third edi- 

 tion. One can entertain as a passing fancy the 

 suggestion of the closing lines of Shelley's " Sen- 

 sitive-Plant : " 



'*. - . . in this life 

 Of error, ignorance, and strife, 

 Where nothing; is, but all thins? seem, 

 And we the shadows of the dream— 



" It is a modest creed, and yet 

 Pleasant, if one considers it, 

 To own that death itself must be, 

 Like all the rest, a mockery. 



"That garden sweet, that lady fair, 

 And all sweet shapes and odors there, 

 In truth, have never passed away : 

 Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed ; not they. 



" For love, and beauty, and delight, 

 There is no death nor change : their might 

 Exceeds our organs, which endure 

 No light, being themselves obscure." 



And some form of the same idea is common 

 enough among mystical thinkers. But few of us 

 are able to see any actual value in the teaching 

 that it is we who are dead, not Nature. We have 

 just read over again the four hundred close pages 

 of that essay, and find ourselves compelled to 

 think the whole speculation a mere cul-de-sac. If, 

 through selfishness, or " self-ness," man has some 

 "defect," which may be described as deadness — 

 upon what excepted spot of his complex nature 

 is he able to plant the lever for working the ar- 

 gument ? The case put by Mr. Hinton himself 

 of the correction made by the Copernican astron- 

 omy does not apply — there is no analogy. The 

 correction really made no change to us except 

 one of simplification ; it was perfectly conceivable 

 that all the knowledge we have since acquired 

 might (if we had the requisite ingenuity) have 

 been gained under the ancient theory. But the 

 main point is, that " man " cannot assume " man " 



