B74 Reviews. [ April, 
PAMPHLETS. 
Tue Power or Gop 1n Hrs Animmat Creation. By Professor 
R. Owen, D.C.L., F.R.S.  Nisbet.* 
Tr is not always the iconoclast who renders the greatest services to 
his fellow-men. Much as we may admire the courage of the man who 
steps forth boldly from the crowd, and under the conviction that the 
idol which it adores must be broken in order to show its impotence, 
shatters it to fragments; we have still more faith in him who quietly 
leads the terrified worshippers up to the stone image, and seeking to 
soothe their apprehensions, satisfies them by the touch that it possesses 
no life, nor yet the power to injure or befriend them. Errors incul- 
cated during long ages may be shaken for an instant, but they cannot 
be eradicated by a coup d’éiat, and it often happens that a gentle 
and well-timed remonstrance has a more lasting influence upon the 
minds of men than the loudest, though they may be the most rightful 
denunciations. 
We have before us an illustration of this fact in the delivery of the 
present lecture to the Young Men’s Christian Association, in which 
Professor Owen has not only rendered an important service to science, 
but has displayed great moral courage in planting the banner of pro- 
gress and free discussion upon the walls of a fortress that few younger 
men would have ventured to storm. In direct opposition to the pre- 
conceived views entertained by the large majority of his hearers on 
theological subjects, he stated firmly, but temperately, the results of 
modern scientific research, most widely at variance with the tenets of 
many orthodox theologians, and gave additional force to his uncom- 
promising assertions, by selecting only those topics which are no longer 
open to debate. 
The vast assemblage of his hearers, lay and clerical, men and 
women of every age and temper, would be nearly unanimous in the 
belief that the world is about 6,000 years old, and that the whole 
fabric, with its living denizens, was formed perfect in seven days of 
twenty-four hours; but he told them that the researches of science 
have led to the certainty that such a period is utterly, “nay, absurdly 
inadequate,” for the Divine operations as they are conducted, to have 
prepared and peopled the dry land. 
He assured them further, that instead of physical death having 
come into the world with the “ fall,” “life has been enjoyed during 
the same countless thousand of years; and that with life, from its 
beginning, has been death.” And by means of a diagram, showing the 
geological and paleontological history of the past, with the traces of 
man, osseous and archeological (if we may so call them), he exhibited 
to them the indisputable evidence of his great antiquity. 
And should even the Darwinian theory of the natural selection of new 
* A Lecture delivered in Exeter Hall before the Young Men’s Christian 
Association, 
