1875.] ( 353 ) 
NWOTICES OF ~ BOOE'S:. 
The Origin of Creation; or the Science of Matter and Force. 
A New System of Natural Philosophy. By Tromas 
Roperick Fraser, M.D., and ANDREW Dewar. London: 
Longmans and Co. 
To some of our contemporaries the book before us will supply, 
doubtless, matter for jokes not a few. To us it is simply a 
psychological phenomenon, and one of the most puzzling, as 
well as the most painful, that have come before us for many 
years. The case is this :—Either the great bulk of our knowledge 
in all the Sciences, from Astronomy to Biology, is a delusion, 
and the most eminent philosophers of the past and the present 
are mistaken, or this work is the most singular collection of 
errors and fallacies ever brought together by misplaced human 
ingenuity. If we, for argument’s sake, admit the former alter- 
native, we shall find it in the highest degree improbable that any 
two men within the limits of an ordinary life-time could acquire 
knowledge sufficient to demonstrate the fundamental errors of 
every branch of Science, and, going still further, replace these 
errors with truth. The Authors certainly lay claim to very ex- 
tensive experience. The data upon which their ‘‘theories have 
been built have, in all the subjects touched upon, been based on 
personal observations in chemistry, telegraphy, and marine 
diving ; in an extensive experience in coal and gold mines; also, 
while travelling in the Gulf Stream, the calms of the Equator, 
the coasts of Brazil, California, and Mexico, the Mediterranean, 
the Bay of Fundy, the hot sulphur-baths of Salt Lake, the great 
Geysers of California, and the mangroves of the Isthmus of 
Panama.” During these researches and travels they profess to 
have discovered ‘‘the duality of atoms, the properties and force of 
matter, the cause of life, the source of mind, the cause of 
chemical action, the cause of sunlight, the cause of variation in 
ships’ compasses, the cause of boiler explosions, the cause of 
winds and storms, the process of digestion, the cause of the 
tides, that magnetism is weight and supersedes gravitation, that 
coral is a semi-mineral growth and not the work of insects (!), 
the cause of meteors, the cause of auroras, the cause of the 
circulation of the blood, that hydrogen gas has the properties 
not only of metals but of minerals, that oxygen gas has the pro- 
perties of vegetable matter.” This we must admit is a very 
extensive and important array of discoveries, and a small part 
only, if substantiated, will suffice to earn for them the highest 
honours that Science has to bestow. We note, at the outset, 
that they desire to be judged in a rather peculiar manner :—‘“‘By 
the light of their faculty of common sense—the name, we may 
