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NATURE 



\_May 26, 1 88 1 



ciples of evidence and reasoning which held good of the 

 language and history of Greece or Rome must hold 

 equally good of the language and history of the ancient 

 Jews. 



The lectures he has now pubhshed under the heading 

 of " The Old Testament in the Jewish Church," put in a 

 popular and intelligible form the chief conclusions arrived 

 at by modern critics in regard to the Pentateuch and its 

 position in Jewish history, together with the evidence 

 upon which they rest. The reader is led on from one 

 point in the argument to another with admirable skill and 

 clearness ; nothing essential is omitted, while at the same 

 time the whole chain of reasoning may be followed 

 without difficulty by those who do not know a Hebrew 

 Letter and have never read a line of critical theology. 

 Prof. Robertson Smith claims that there is no opposition 

 between the results of critical inquiry and the fullest 

 belief in the divine character of the Biblical record ; on 

 the contrary, these results, if frankly admitted, will be 

 found to be confirmatory of the orthodox faith. Indeed 

 the Professor's most relentless opponents ought to be 

 gratified by the hard blows he deals at " rationahsm," 

 whatever that may mean. 



With the theological aspect of the question we have of 

 course nothing to do. But we must congratulate the Pro- 

 fessor upon having found such large and sympathetic 

 audiences to listen to an exposition of the mode in which 

 the scientific principles of inductive inquiry have been 

 applied to early history. The chief object of his con- 

 tention is that the Levitical Law has taken its true place 

 in the development of the Jewish nation ; instead of 

 coming at th6 beginning of the nation's existence, and so 

 making the whole of its subsequent history unintelligible, 

 it has been shown to have come at the end. Unknown 

 to the most pious of the judges and kings, unknown 

 equally to the prophets before the Exile, it naturally 

 makes its appearance when Judah had ceased to be an 

 independent state, when the free spontaneity of prophetic 

 utterance was passing away, and when the priestly rulers 

 of the returned exiles had no longer to fear the contamina- 

 tion of foreign idolatry or the erection of rival altars. 

 The Levitical Law, according to Prof Smith, follows the 

 labours of the prophets ; it does not precede them. 



This result he claims to have obtained by questioning the 

 Jewish records in accordance with the principles of scien- 

 tific evidence. The credibility of a historical fact rests 

 upon the authority of the documents or oral traditions that 

 vouch for it, and naturally diminishes in proportion to 

 the length of time between its supposed occurrence and 

 the date of the earliest document in which it is described. 

 The age and character, therefore, of a historical document 

 must be closely tested and ascertained. The means for 

 doing this are threefold : historical, literary, and philolo- 

 gical. We must discover whether the historical condi- 

 tions presupposed by the document agree with its assumed 

 age, whether it bears marks of compilation and redaction, 

 or has come to us straight from the hand of a single author, 

 and whether the language in which it is written is as 

 old as it professes to be. But when the age and character 

 of the document have been thus determined, the scien- 

 tific historian has still much to do. If its claims to 

 antiquity can be substantiated we have still to ask 

 whether the facts it narrates are the statements of a 



contemporary, or only the far-off echoes of a bygone 

 tale. If, on the other hand, its claims are disallowed, 

 we have yet to discover how much or how little of its 

 assertions may be believed ; what rests on first-hand 

 evidence, and what is merely late tradition or the coloured 

 narrative of the writer himself. And even when all this 

 has been done, our work is not quite over. The facts we 

 have extracted from our authorities must be pieced to- 

 gether and shown to follow in a natural and continuous 

 stream of development. For in history as in nature the 

 scientific method reveals to us the law of continuity and 

 development, and whatever offends against this law can- 

 not be admitted in a scientific reconstruction of the past. 

 The school of historians to which Prof. Robertson Smith 

 belongs believe they have proved that the traditional 

 view of the Pentateuch and the Levitical legislation does 

 offend against this law, and they would change and 

 modify it accordingly. ,And in thus changing and modi- 

 fying it they claim the support of history, of literature, 

 and of philology. 



OUR BOOK SHELF 



Manuals of Elementary Science — Electricity. By Prof. 

 Fleeming Jenkin, F.R.S. (London: Society for Pro- 

 moting Christian Knowledge, iSSi.) 

 This little work, of little more than a hundred pages, is 

 a remarkable tour de force, since it contains in briefest 

 language almost everything that can be taught, without 

 using mathematical symbols, of the modern notions on 

 electricity. It therefore well deserves to stand as a com- 

 panion volume beside that remarkable primer of " Matter 

 and IMotion" of the late Prof. Clerk-Maxwell. The strong 

 point of the present elementary work on electricity is the 

 way in which it points out the connection between electrical 

 (and magnetic) phenomena and the phenomena of other 

 branches of physics as regulated by the law of the Conser- 

 vation of Energy. So early as the sixth paragraph the fun- 

 damental idea of electric potential is introduced, a course 

 which is surely to be commended, inasmuch as there is no 

 more inherent difficulty in the mind of the beginner in 

 conceiving of electricity as able to do work by moving 

 from one position to another than of conceiving it as 

 able to exert a force at a distance, while there can be no 

 question that the former of these two conceptions is the 

 more fruitful for expressing electric actions and reactions. 

 The inherent connection between induction and charge is 

 carefully insisted upon, and the beginner is told in simple 

 language how the equal and opposite stresses between the 

 two elements of an induction-pair, separated by an insu- 

 lating medium, represent a store of energy whose seat is 

 in reality in the intervening medium. Where so much 

 pains has been taken to spare the beginner from having 

 anything to unlearn, it is a pity that in the very first sen- 

 tence our antiquatecl friends the "two imponderable fluids 

 called positive and negative electricity " crop up. We 

 also think it is a mistake to refer to a magneto-electric 

 generator as a magneto-electric " engine " (as is done on 

 page 107). The chapter on Electro-chemistry is admir- 

 able in every way. The following paragraph, on the 

 perception of electricity, deserves to be quoted entire : — 

 " Our atmosphere is not only electrified, but presents 

 such variety in the intensity and distribution of its elec- 

 trification, that a sense enabling 71s directly to perceive 

 electricity would frequently disclose a scene as varied as a 

 gorgeous sunset. This sense would reveal the surface of 

 solid bodies delineated by varying electrical density. 

 Dielectrics would be transparent to the new sense, and 

 conductors would be opaque, having their projecting 

 edges, corners, and points marked with startling distinct- 



