iSjj-] Notices of Books. 527 



the true honour of his country will share our comfortable satis- 

 faction in knowing that Dr. Wyville Thompson is the Director 

 of the Civilian Staff of the Challenger Expedition ; and our 

 conviction that when future historians recite the sea-battles that 

 have been gloriously fought under the British flag, and the names 

 of the ships that have carried it to victory, those of the Light- 

 ning, the Porcupine, and the Challenger will take leading rank in 

 the list; and also in our hope that the British Navy is entering 

 upon a new era of higher and better conquests than those which 

 have hitherto fed the pride of the nation. 



Critiques and Addresses. By Thomas Henry Huxley, LL.D., 



F.R.S. London : Macmillan and Co. 1873. 

 This is a collection of Essays like the " Lay Sermons, which, 

 as Dr. Huxley says, " indicate the high-water mark of the 

 various tides of occupation by which I have been carried along 

 since the beginning of the year 1870. They include the fol- 

 lowing subjects : — " Administrative Nihilism." " The School 

 Boards : What they Can Do and What they May Do." " Medi- 

 cal Education." " Yeast." " The Formation of Coal." " Coral 

 and Coal Reefs." " The Methods and Results of Ethnology." 

 " Some Fixed Points in British Ethnology." " Palaeontology 

 and the Doctrine of Evolution." " Biogenesis and Abiogenesis." 

 " Mr. Darwin's Critics." " The Genealogy of Animals." " Bishop 

 Berkeley on the Metaphysics of Sensation." These titles 

 sufficiently indicate the range of subjects, and the impossi- 

 bility of including within our limits anything like an analysis or 

 discussion of the contents of this volume. The subjects and 

 their treatment are strikingly characteristic of the noble breadth 

 of Dr. Huxley's attainments and philosophy. 



The vast accumulations of modern knowledge have rendered 

 a division of labour among the experts in Science a matter 

 of absolute necessity. We have undoubtedly gained great ad- 

 vantages by one man devoting his life to mathematics, another 

 to metallurgy, a third to organic chemistry, a fourth to com- 

 parative anatomy, &c. ; it has enabled either of these to 

 learn all that has been done in his particular department, and 

 thus to start fairly upon the path of original investigation. 

 This arrangement is, however, not unaccompanied with dis- 

 advantages, some of them rather serious. Among these is the 

 common practice of assuming that Physics, Chemistry, Physi- 

 ology, Political Economy, Metaphysics, Moral Philosophy, &c, 

 are subjects that have actual separate existences in the scheme 

 of Nature, rather than regarding them in their true aspect as 

 artificial subdivisions of the one and only science of Universal 

 Natural Law, and remembering that such divisions have 

 been made for the accommodation of human weakness. There 



