144 NATURAL SCIENCE [February 



Shakespeare and Milton there is always room for doubt or suspicion with respect to the 

 so-called scientific fads, fetishes, hypotheses, &c., which are broached and maintained 

 with bold and aggressive rhetoric by superior ruling men. The principal question to be 

 settled is, whether these fads, &c., are based on true science, or whether their origin 

 may be assigned to a sort of philosophy of the universe or of things in general, which 

 any superior man possessed of a certain order of mind or kind of talent is bound to hold 

 and maintain ? Thus, for example, the poet Goethe, in the course of his dabbling in 

 scientific subjects, was known to seek by intuition the bond which unites the diverse 

 parts of a natural object, and thuswise to imagine his 'ideal type,' which permitted 

 him to re-unite all the animal kingdom into one harmonious whole, although infinitely 

 varied. We learn also that Wordsworth hated science, because it loses the principle of 

 unity and continuity. Tennyson also has given marked expression to the pantheistic 

 conception of the unity of life, as, c.rj., in his 'flower in a crannied wall.' Certain 

 French men of science aver that the doctrine of evolution is more studied in England 

 than elsewhere. Why this is so it is not easy to comprehend, unless it be that the 

 honest evolutionist is really a sort of poetical pantheist like Goethe, and seeks to intro- 

 duce a unity into everything, and to solve the mysteries of the universe by means of 

 synthesis, going perhaps as far as Lord Kelvin when he talks of ' failure,' because he 

 had not succeeded in merging effects into causes and causes into effects, and making a 

 unity wherein thought itself would disappear. Such being the pronounced views ex- 

 pounded by various poets and literates, is it to be wondered that many of our eminently 

 rhetorical scientists have been infected therewith ? The geological doctrine of Uni- 

 formity seems to be a case in point. The aphorism that " the forces of nature have 

 always been in quality and quantity what they are now " chimes in very harmoniously 

 with the poetic philosophy of the unity of life and substance and everything else. Per- 

 sons who are afflicted with a baffled desire for unification, and make the unification of 

 life and tlie physical forces a special feature in their scientific postulates, are not neces- 

 sarily scholastic metaphysicians or sound a priori reasoucrs. A truly scientific meta- 

 physician who holds to the doctrine of pantheism as a more scientific dogma, and does 

 not practically bear it out in the region and area of actual investigation and research, 

 is, of course, placed in a difierent position altogether. It is therefore the jjoets, and 

 not the metaphysicians, who ought to bear the blame in what Sir H. Howorth con- 

 demns. P. Q. Keegax. 

 Patterdale, Westmokelaxd, 

 January \Wi, Idi^S. 



A Bkighton correspondent sends us a copy of the Church ami Household (Brighton) 

 for November, containing an amusing specimen of Natural History as " she is wrote." 

 A caricature of the argonaut and a drawing of a common lobster figure respectively as 

 a 'pearly nautilus' and a 'scorpion,' while the accompanying letterpress is of about 

 the same standard of trustworthiness. It is surely time that the rudiments of Natural 

 History had penetrated the mind even of the uneducated penny-a-liner ; but aias ! this 

 worried mortal is still in the dark ages. 



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