IV. 



Pseudo- Biology. 



OF all the pseudo-sciences that flutter abroad in this fin de siecJe 

 and attempt, often with too much success, to inveigle the 

 unwary, none is so popular, none so fatally attractive, as that whose 

 professors preach from the pseudo-biological pulpit. It is because it 

 deals so largely with an assumed biology in its bearings on the 

 conduct and progress of our selves, our nation, and our race, that it 

 attracts us first, and that if we follow its will-o'-the-wisp, we founder 

 in ignominious error. Its vogue is also great because so many of us 

 poor mortals are wandering around in the darkness, having deserted 

 the hand that formerly guided us and still searching for another ; 

 then to us wanderers there appear evangelists of a new gospel, which 

 is superficially intelligible, and which we readily accept because we 

 really understand it no more than do its preachers. 



There has been lying on ovir table for some months, now looked 

 at and now cast aside, a book by that extraordinarily popular Pro- 

 fessor of this subject, Mr. Henry Drummond. It has been on our 

 minds, at intervals, to give some review of this book, but we have 

 never been able to decide whether we should be warranted in 

 devoting any of our space to its consideration. And we only do so 

 now in response to the request of numerous correspondents, whose 

 minds seem, not unnaturally, to have been disturbed by the diverse 

 criticisms that this work has called forth. 



The title of the work in question is " The Lowell Lectures on 

 the Ascent of Man." The Lowell Lectures are, we believe, delivered 

 in Boston, one of the chief intellectual centres in the United States ; 

 and we doubt not that the audience attending them would be worthy 

 of any lecturer in the world. Remembering this, we have, often and 

 often as we perused Mr. Drummond's pages, wondered with a mirth- 

 ful and a sorrowful wonder to think of our cultured Bostonian friends 

 and the keen youth of Harvard sitting in solemn rows, agape and 

 aghast at the meretricious and fallacious periods of this pseudo- 

 biological pulpiteer. What did the cute sophomores from Cam- 

 bridge make of this marvellous utterance ? — " Run the eye for a 

 moment up the scale of animal life. At the bottom are the first 

 animals, the Protozoa. The Coelenterates follow, then in mixed 

 array, the Echinoderms, Worms, and Molluscs. Above these come 



2 G 



