396 Notices of Boohs. 'July, 



interest and the chief need in lectures before a public whose 

 education has been mainly literary." 



We will now glance at the Lectures seriatim, premising that 

 the first and second have been translated by Mr. H. W. Eve, of 

 Wellington College ; the third by Mr. A. G. Ellis, whose papers 

 on musical subjects in the " Proceedings of the Royal Society " 

 some of our readers will remember ; the fourth and seventh by 

 Dr. Atkinson, who is also editor of the series ; the fifth by Dr. 

 Tyndall ; and the eighth and last by Dr. Flight. 



In the first lecture, which was delivered before the University 

 of Heidelberg in 1862, the author traces the connection between 

 the Natural Sciences and other branches of knowledge. He 

 commences by pointing out the extraordinary progress made 

 during the last century in all branches of Natural Science. So 

 long as its development was slight, we cannot wonder that it 

 was not recognised as an educational engine, or admitted as a 

 part of the university curriculum to take up a position side by 

 side with the more ancient subjects : — Theology, Jurisprudence, 

 Medicine. The astonishing activity of research has altered the 

 condition of things. The four elements of the ancients have be- 

 come sixty-four ; the six planets of 1781 have increased to seventy- 

 five ; the fifteen hundred stars of the 17th century have become 

 twenty thousand, the position of which in the heavens has been 

 accurately determined ; and so in other branches of sciences. Con- 

 sequently our universities recognise these subjects now far more 

 fully than ever before, and while in the 17th century they were 

 often represented by one or two professors, they are now taught 

 by seven or eight. The disruption between Moral Philosophy 

 and Physical Philosophy may be traced to Hegel rather than to 

 Kant, for the latter based his Cosmogony upon Newton's law of 

 Universal Gravitation, while the former endeavoured to throw 

 into discredit both Newton himself and the whole body of ex- 

 isting Natural Philosophy. Then came an open feud : " the 

 philosophers accused the scientific men of narrowness ; the 

 scientific men retorted that the philosopers were crazy. And so 

 it came about that men of science began to lay some stress on 

 the banishment of all philosophical influences from their work ; 

 while some of them, including men of the greatest acuteness, 

 went so far as to condemn philosophy altogether, not merely as 

 useless, but as mischievous dreaming." With the Moral 

 Sciences it was the same ; they almost ignored the existence of 

 physical science, and often denied it the very name. This 

 opposition, however, was not long maintained ; as the Natural 

 Sciences increased in importance, they received more and more 

 general recognition from other sources. Yet when we remember the 

 points of dissonance between the Moral and the Natural Sciences 

 we must admit that a perfect assimilation can never be possible : 

 "while the Moral Sciences deal directly with the nearest and dearest 

 interests of the human mind, and with the institutions it has 



