1893- NOTES AND COMMENTS. 15 



One Jacob Horner has written a book called " Did a Hen or 

 an Egg exist first ? or My Talks with a Sceptic," One Mr. James 

 Crompton has edited it, and the Religious Tract Society have pub- 

 lished it in London in 1892. Mr. Jacob Horner says in the preface 

 that he has found many of the artisans intelligent, that they are 

 fond of an argument, that they want to understand the grounds of 

 religion. "They like to get hold of a smart book with some dash and 

 'go ' in it." Therefore has this book been written. It is a series of 

 dialogues between an uncle and his nephew Tom Rod, "who has taken 

 it into his head to be a Freethinker." In each round the stuffing is very 

 agreeably knocked out of Tom till, at the end of the book, he writes a 

 letter, the purport of which is that he can't come up to time again until 

 he has been refilled. The stuffing is the very worst and oldest we 

 have ever seen. It is, in fact, so bad, that it is hardly worth while 

 pointing out that the nimble Uncle's blows are nearly all fouls. Take 

 the first round as a sample. For brevity, we take the blows only and 

 leave out the feints : — Uncle : Did a Hen or an Egg exist first ? 

 Tom objects to question. Uncle explains, and Tom admits that every 

 egg comes from a hen, every hen comes from a chicken, and every 

 chicken from an egg. Uncle puts in that Sir Charles Lyell says "You 

 must explain the past by the present." Tom admits. Uncle : This 

 must have held in the past. Tom admits. Therefore, first egg must 

 have come from first hen, and so the first hen must have existed before 

 the egg, and could not have come from an egg; and so Lyell's prin- 

 ciple breaks down ; you can't explain the past from the present. 

 Stuffing badly out. There are 96 pages of this sort of thing. The 

 last chapter is very appropriately entitled " Where are you going ? " 



Our first article this month relates to the life and works of Sir 

 Richard Owen, who died on December 18. At the moment of going 

 to press we regret to learn that the conspiracy of silence so long pre- 

 vailing in certain quarters as to the great anatomist's writings, 

 extended even to the arrangements for his burial. We have to 

 record that a public funeral was not even offered, and Sir Richard 

 Owen's remains were interred in Ham Churchyard in the presence of 

 a small gathering of personal friends and official representatives of the 

 scientific institutions of London. 



