BOOK NOTICES. 637 
an ordinary index cut in the side. We have also adopted the plan of cutting out 
and preserving within easy reach the printed indexes of such exchanges, so that 
when we desired to cram for a certain subject we could look up all that had been 
published in any of them without much trouble. But it will be seen that either 
of these plans is troublesome and unsatisfactory, while the use of Burr’s publica- 
tion, with its double and treble indexes, saves a great part of the labor and gives 
just what is needed, in a classified and condensed form, and preserves it in a 
handsome volume, easy to handle and an ornament to any book-shelf or library 
table. A very good description of this work is further given in our advertising 
columns. 
THE PROBLEM OF Human Lire. By A. Wilford Hall: Octavo, pp. 524. Hall 
& Co., New York, 1880. $2.00. 
This work is offered as an explanation of the quality and operation of the 
life principle on the basis of its assumed necessary substantiality, as an annihila- 
tion of evolution, and as a destructive review of Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, 
Haeckel, Helmholtz and Mayer. Several chapters are devoted to a consideration 
of matter, substance, force, life, mind, soul, spirit, God. The fifth and sixth, 
constituting more than one-third of the volume, to that of the Nature of Sound, 
and the remainder to Evolution. 
The author writes succinctly and forcibly, and carries with him a kind of 
magnetism which attracts the reader if it does not convince him. His introduc- 
tion contains the gist of his argument against a ‘‘ theistic evolution,” and it must 
be admitted that he meets those portions which he quotes of the statements of 
such writers as Dr. McCosh, Rev. Joseph Cook, etc., fairly and with great appo- 
siteness ; charging that this view of evolution is the same as Darwinism, except 
that Darwin takes no account of God after the miraculous creation of the first 
simple form, while the theistic evolutionists claim that every variation of one 
species into another is produced and nurtured under the supervising direction 
of God’s providence. He is aggressive in his manner, and ridicules Joseph 
Cook’s physiological statements unsparingly, and at the same time sarcastically 
terms it ‘‘ obsequious absurdity” in Dr. McCosh to admit that there is nothing 
antagonistic between spontaneous generation and a religious belief in the exist- 
ence of God. 
To give the reader a better idea of his theory of the forces that exist in man 
and nature analogous to those exerted by God himself and that possess a sub- 
stantial, or, as he expresses it, an entitative nature, as opposed to an ethereal or im- 
palpable form, we quote a brief passage from the first chapter: ‘‘And whenever 
we can grasp the thought that man is a dual being, possessing a double organism, 
the one structure being corporeal, visible, tangible, the other incorporeal, invisi- 
ble, and intangible; and when we can further recognise the fact that man, 
through the aid of his senses, can really and truly extend his personal presence 
to a limited distance beyond that of his corporeal form, we can then conceive of 
