476 Mr. C. Tomlinson on the Weathering of Rocks, 



The monthly magazines, and many of the weekly papers also, 

 deal largely in fiction, the former having two and even three 

 long stories going on in fragments from month to month. 



This rage for fiction is such that when young people have 

 finished what is called their education, and can select their 

 own reading, they too often limit their mental efforts to the 

 perusal of the popular novel. 



The effect of this general craving for excitement is as inju- 

 rious to the mind of the individual, as it is to the intellectual 

 progress of the age. If the reading were limited to the works 

 of the great masters of fiction, and the reader strove to study 

 them with a certain critical sense of their value, the result 

 might be wholesome ; but a morbid appetite for the sensational 

 literature of the day can only be mischievous. 



Some modern writers of fiction, in endeavouring to be 

 realistic, introduce scientific details into their work. If these 

 details were accurate there would be some compensation for 

 the injury inflicted in another direction ; but they are in 

 general calculated to give as false views of science, as the 

 other details are often calculated to spoil the appetite for 

 more wholesome literature. 



A writer whose works are just now exceedingly popular has 

 the following astonishing statement, expressed in very ques- 

 tionable grammar : — 



" We perceived a mass of stone was slowly rising from the 

 floor, and vanishing into the rock above, where doubtless 

 there was a cavity prepared to receive it." This stone, 

 weighing thirty tons, is supposed to have been lifted by 

 means of " some very simple lever, which was moved ever so 

 little by pressure on a secret spot." 



In another story by the same author, four persons in a 

 canoe in the bowels of the earth receive their supplies of air 

 from that which a river had previously absorbed and then 

 liberated. 



But it may be said that the stories in which these events 

 are recorded are of the Baron Munchausen species, and are so 

 far in keeping with its method. But the same treatment is 

 observed in a quasi-historical novel by the same author, which 

 deals with our contest with the Boers, and the cession to them 

 of the Transvaal. The writer is said to have visited the 

 country which he professes to describe, and yet we have 

 minute details of a mighty columns or fingers of rock, not 

 solid columns, but columns formed by huge boulders piled 

 mason-fashion one upon another/'' * One of ihese is described 



* 'Jess/ by H. Rider Haggard, 2nd edit., 1887, p. 43. 



