82 Reviews— Owen’s Lecture. 
INSTANCES OF THE PowrEerR oF Gop AS MANIFESTED IN His 
AntmMAL Creation. By Professor RicHarD OWEN, D.C.L., 
F.R.S. London : Loneman & Co., 1864, pp. 64, with illustrations. 
HIS lecture, originally delivered before the Young Men’s Chris- 
tian Association at Exeter Hall, was published in a separate 
form under the auspices of that Society, but excluded from their annual 
volume of lectures. To the geologist it affords many points of interest. 
Professor Owen, in a lecture replete with the most elegant diction, 
the most conclusive arguments, and the most powerful array of facts 
in favour of the doctrines which the vast majority of scientific men 
have long accepted, declares his belief that the periods of time during 
which the earth can be proved to have existed, to have been clothed 
with verdure, and peopled with hosts of animals, and ultimately by 
man himself, are in their duration as well as in their nature, incapable 
of being compressed into the narrow limits of the short chronology 
in which a jealous, and frequently an ignorant theology has endea- 
voured to force them. 
Such evidences as those afforded, e.¢., by the existence of serpents 
then, as now, gliding prone on the belly, and endued with poison- 
fangs,—by the frequent evidences of death, disease, and every form 
of physical corruption, ages before the advent of man,—by the facts 
of the geographical distribution of animals in the Upper Tertiary 
beds—are pointed out by Professor Owen to be wholly ‘ incompatible 
with the notion of the divergence of all existing, air-breathing, or 
drownable animal species from one Asiatic centre within a period of 
4,000 years.’ 
There are those geologists who will chide Professor Owen for the 
over-delicacy with which these facts’ are brought forward by him. 
In these days of Biichner and Vogt, no doubt Professor Owen’s 
opinions will be unsatisfactory to the ultra school of developmental- 
ists. Others there are with whose opinions they may more closely 
accord ; and we cannot sympathize with the authorities of the Insti- 
tution who have interposed obstacles to the publication of Professor 
Owen’s lecture, after it had been well received by the great body of 
its members. 
Such extended views as are held by Professor Owen and the 
majority of geologists need not necessarily destroy man’s faith, or 
be subversive of his highest and holiest aspirations; but every fresh 
vista which natural science opens before his intellectual gaze should 
rather conduce to strengthen and cherish his belief, and none of 
those points of faith which are considered essential to Christianity 
are, or ever can be, shaken by our knowledge of any scientific fact. 
To those who, ignorant of the real motives which actuate a truly 
scientific man, possess an idea of religion so little reverential that 
they consider it dependent on any scientific fact, we would, with 
Professor Owen, ask, ‘ what, if any, sacred doctrine, rests upon our 
cognizance of a geological fact, or could be shaken by the new inter- 
pretation of a paleontological discovery ? But to those whose daily 
path in science it may be (and it is often one forced on them contrary — 
