546 NATURE 
of cases illustrating the development of culture in its 
straightforward course. Harder problems come before 
us, where we see some institution arise, flourish, and 
decline within a limited period, as though resulting from 
a temporary combination of social forces, or answering 
only a temporary purpose in civilisation. 
To take aninstance from Mr. Spencer’s Table, English 
history has seen the judicial duel brought in at the 
Conquest, flourishing for centuries, declining for centuries 
more, till its last formal relic was abolished in 1820. 
Again, in the Old English period, marriage appears as a 
purely civil contract, on the basis of purchase of the 
wife; then with Christianity comes in the religious 
sanction, which by 1076 had become so absolute that 
secular marriages were prohibited : with a strong turn of 
the tide of public opinion, the English Marriage Act of 
1653 treated marriage as a civil contract, to be solemnised 
before a justice of the peace ; till after a series of actions 
and re-actions, in our own day the civil and ecclesiastical 
solemnisation stand on an equal footing before the law. 
Closely similar has been the course of English society 
on the larger question of a National Church, which, soon 
after the introduction of Christianity, claimed an all but 
absolute conformity throughout the nation, practically 
maintained the claim for ages, and then was forced back 
to toleration, which has at last left it with a supremacy 
little more than nominal. This is not the place to discuss 
these subjects for themselves, but to show how the table 
before us, by its mere statement of classified events in 
chronological order, must force even the unwilling student 
to recognise processes of evolution in every department of 
social life. The writer of the present notice once asked 
an eminent English historian, a scholar to whom the 
records of medizval politics are as familiar as our daily 
newspaper is to us, whether he believed in the existence 
of what is called the philosophy of history. The historian 
avowed his profound distrust of, and almost disbelief in, 
any such philosophy. Now it may seem a simple matter 
to have tabulated the main phenomena of English social 
and political history in parallel columns, as Mr. Collier has 
here done under Mr. Spencer’s direction, but his tables 
are a sufficient answer to all disbelievers in the possibility 
of a science of history. Where the chronicle of individual 
lives often perplexes and mystifies the scholar, the gene- 
ralisation of social principles from the chroniclers mate- 
rials shows an order of human affairs where cause and 
effect take their inevitable course, as in Physics or 
Biology. 
It may be objected, however, that summing up com- 
plex events in short headings, and arranging these in 
columns, is a rough and ready method often leading to 
erroneous inferences, and even liable to gross error. It 
is evidently in order to guard against this that Mr. 
Spencer follows the first part of his scheme by a second. 
Here, under their proper headings, the passages from 
standard authorities which vouch for the brief statements 
in the tables are given in full, and with references. This 
part of the work, much the largest in extent, is thus an 
elaborate historical commonplace-book, containing some 
thousands of selected quotations. Mr. Collier is on the 
whole to be congratulated on the completeness of his 
reading, and the discrimination with which he has chosen 
his passages. So much information, encumbered with so 
meant Co ae, SEY ee eae 
mea VES Ieee - he eae Re Puen 
a : . Rie i fas 
> 
| Oct. 30, 1873 
little rubbish, has never before been brought to bear on 
the development of English institutions. There is hardly 
a living student but will gain something by looking 
through the compilation which relates to his own special — 
subject, whether this be law’ or morals, education or 
theology, the division of labour or the rise of modern 
scientific ideas. Of course it is very far from perfect. 
There are some actual blunders; a weak authority is 
often taken where a strong one was to be had; small 
matters are often put in, and large ones left out ; the want 
of notes leaves no opportunity of correcting an author’ 
half-true statement. ‘Thus under the heading of Acces- 
sory Institutions, there is a good account of the Royal 
Institution and the Pharmaceutical Society, and a men- 
tion of the Russell Institution and the Swedenborg 
Society, but not a word of the Royal Society. An extract 
from the Pictorial History of England ascribes the 
system of Sunday Schools to Mr. Robert Raikes, of the 
Gloucester Fournal, about 1780, whereas their real in- 
ventor, Jonas Hanway, flourished at an earlier date. 
Again, under the heading of Religious Ideas and Super- 
stitions, various slips are to be noticed. It was natural 
enough that, years ago, Brand should, in his Antiquities, 
have considered the country rite of throwing toast to the 
apple-trees to secure a fruitful year as being a “ relic of the 
heathen sacrifice to Pomona;” but a modern reader 
quoting him, should never in Brand’s old-fashioned way 
have dragged in a Roman deity to account for a genuine 
English superstition. Just below this is the following 
sentence in brackets, and without an author’s name :— 
“The resistance of tides in the Wash caused by their 
meeting with the ebb-waters is called the A.gar—one of 
the gods of the Scandinavian mythology.” This statement 
is misleading, and not the less so for having a real ety- 
mology hidden behind it. Our English word eag7e, sig 
nifying the “ bore” of an estuary, is Anglo-Saxon eagor, 
the sea, and its use merely asserts the plain fact that the 
sea runs up the channel. It is true that there is a corre- 
sponding old Norse word @g?r, the sea, and that this in 
Scandinavian mythology becomes the personal name of 
Gegir, the Sea-god. But it does not follow that our 
eastern counties’ word had ever any such mytho- 
logical notion attached to it. These happen to be the 
first weak points which struck the writer in glancing over 
a page or two in quest of errors. It is needless to con 
tinue this critical process ona professed book of extracts 
enough has been done to show that the proper use of such 
a work as the present is not so much to furnish the scholar 
with complete second-hand ideas, as to indicate how the 
ideas lie and where they may be obtained first-hand. 
Mr. Spencer, out of the evidence amassed by the 
readers collecting facts under his direction, might have 
made an admirable treatise of the usual kind on the 
History of English Civilisation. No doubt, however, 
for years to come lectures will be delivered and articles 
written full of suggestive facts in the history of culture, 
which the initiated will recognise as borrowed from the 
unwieldy pages of this present atlas-like compilation. 
In the meantime, we may hope that Mr. Spencer’s 
scheme may be carried out through the whole range of 
savage and civilised life, and that his tables of develop- 
ment of culture (printed on one side of the paper asi 
anticipation of such use), may be set up like maps on 
