776 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



so very angry with some obscure people called Agnostics, whose 

 'views, if we may judge by the accounts left in the works of a 

 great positivist controversial writer, were very absurd. 



To put the matter briefly, M. Comte, finding Christianity and 

 Science at daggers drawn, seems to have said to Science : " You 

 find Christianity rotten at the core, do you ? Well, I will scoop 

 out the inside of it." And to Romanism : " You find Science mere 

 dry light — cold and bare. Well, I will put your shell over it, and 

 so, as schoolboys make a specter out of a turnip and a tallow can- 

 dle, behold the new religion of Humanity complete ! " 



Unfortunately, neither the Romanists nor the peoj^le who were 

 something more than amateurs in science could be got to worship 

 M. Comte's new idol properly. In the native country of Positiv- 

 ism, one distinguished man of letters and one of science, for a time, 

 helped to make up a roomful of the faithful, but their love soon 

 grew cold. In England, on the other hand, there ai)pears to be 

 little doubt that, in the ninth decade of the century, the multitude 

 of disciples reached the grand total of several score. They had 

 the advantage of the advocacy of one or two most eloquent and 

 learned apostles, and, at any rate, the sympathy of several persons 

 t)f light and leading — and, if they were not seen, they were heard all 

 over the world. On the other hand, as a sect, they labored under 

 the prodigious disadvantage of being refined, estimable people, 

 living in the midst of the worn-out civilization of the Old World ; 

 where any one who had tried to persecute them, as the Mormons 

 were persecuted, would have been instantly hanged. But the ma- 

 jority never dreamed of persecuting them ; on the contrary, they 

 were rather given to scold, and otherwise try the patience of, the 

 majority. 



The history of these sects in the closing years of the century is 

 highly instructive. Mormonism . . . 



But I find I have suddenly slipped off Mr. Harrison's tripod, 

 which I had borrowed for the occasion. The fact is, I am not 

 equal to the prophetical business, and ought not to have under- 

 taken it. — Nineteenth Century. 



Something, it appears, is to be said in favor of the theory that the earth has 

 received and is receiving supplies of carbon from meteors and space. A meteor 

 that was found at Youndegin, Western Austraha, in 1854, contained carbon of a 

 form resembling graphite, but harder, and occurring in cubic crystals, of which 

 about a hundred were separated. Observations of geological strata indicate an 

 increase of carbon in the crust of the earth since the earliest times, for the rocks 

 of the older formations contain less of it than those of the carboniferous and suc- 

 ceeding ones. Dr. Sterry Hunt has attributed the additional supplies to carbonic- 

 acid gas diffused in space, and holds that the supposition that our atmosphere ever 

 contained the whole amount at once would involve the presence of more enormous 

 quantities of it than we can reasonably admit. 



