506 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



quent ; the ancient belief in witchcraft and 

 pervading demons holds its ground, as do 

 the miracle-plays and local festivals ; but a 

 highway act is passed, new roads are being 

 made, the new houses have chimneys, their 

 furniture and fare become more luxurious ; 

 the power of the old feudal families is de- 

 stroyed, the Star-Chamber is new-modeled ; 

 church-fasts are still observed under pain 

 of imprisonment, and high offices of state 

 are still in the hands of churchmen, but 

 among the signs of momentous change come 

 the dissolution of monasteries, and the dis- 

 tinct appearance of a sect of Protestants. 

 Thus the tabulated record goes on till it 

 ends near the present day, among such 

 items as Trades-Unions, Divorce Courts, the 

 Manchester School, County Courts, Free 

 Thought, Railways, Rifled Cannon, Pre-Ra- 

 phaelitism, Chartism, Papal Aggression, and 

 the crowding events of modern manufacture 

 and science. 



" It is by following the several columns 

 downward, that the principle of Evolution, 

 the real key to Mr. Spencer's scheme, is 

 brought out into the broadest light. It seems 

 most strange, however, that he should not 

 have placed in its proper niche the evidence 

 of prehistoric archaeology. Mr. Spencer can 

 hardly doubt that the stone implements found 

 in England prove the existence of one, or 

 probably two, stone-age populations before 

 the Celts, who, under the name of Ancient 

 Britons, begin his series. If he acknowl- 

 edges this, why should a first link so im- 

 portant in his chain of evolution have been 

 dropped ? Otherwise the chain is carefully 

 stretched out so as to display it from end 

 to end. In many matters, simple and direct 

 progress is the rule. From the ancient 

 Briton's bow with its bronze-tipped arrows, 

 to the cross-bow, the matchlock-gun, and 

 thence through successive stages to the rifled 

 breech-loader ; from the rude arithmetic be- 

 fore the introduction of the 'Arabic' nu- 

 merals, through the long series of importa- 

 tions and discoveries which led to the infini- 

 tesimal calculus in its highest modern de- 

 velopment ; from the early English astron- 

 omy, where there was still a solid firmament 

 studded with stars, and revolving on the 

 poles about the central earth, to the period 

 when the perturbations of planets are cal- 

 culated on the theory of gravitation, and the 



constitution of the fixed stars examined by 

 the spectroscope — these are among the mul- 

 titude of cases illustrating the development 

 of culture in its straightforward course. 

 Harder problems come before us, where we 

 see some institution arise, flourish, and de- 

 cline within a limited period, as though re- 

 sulting from a temporary combination of so- 

 cial forces, or answering only a temporary 

 purpose in civilization. 



" To take an instance from Mr. Spencer's 

 table, English history has seen the judicial 

 duel brought in at the Conquest, flourishing 

 for centuries, declining for centuries more, 

 till its last formal relic was abolished in 

 1820. Again, in the Old English period, 

 marriage appears as a purely civil contract, 

 on the basis of purchase of the wife ; then 

 with Christianity comes in the religious 

 sanction, which by 10*76 had become so ab- 

 solute that secular marriages were prohib- 

 ited : with a strong turn of the tide of pub- 

 lic opinion, the English Marriage Act of 

 1653 treated marriage as a civil contract, 

 to be solemnized before a justice of the 

 peace ; till, after a series of actions and re- 

 actions, in our own day the civil and ecclesi- 

 astical solemnization stand on an equal foot- 

 ing before the law. Closely similar has been 

 the course of English society on the larger 

 question of a National Church, which, soon 

 after the introduction of Christianity, claimed 

 an all but absolute conformity throughout 

 the nation, practically maintained the claim 

 for ages, and then was forced back to tol- 

 eration, which has at last left it with a 

 supremacy little more than nominal. This 

 is not the place to discuss these subjects 

 for themselves, but to show how the table 

 before us, by its mere statement of clas- 

 sified events in chronological order, must 

 force even the unwilling student to recog- 

 nize processes of evolution in every de- 

 partment of social life. The writer of the 

 present notice once asked an eminent Eng- 

 lish historian, a scholar to whom the records 

 of mediaeval politics are as familiar as our 

 daily newspaper is to us, whether he believed 

 in the existence of what is called the phi- 

 losophy of history. The historian avowed 

 his profound distrust of, and almost disbelief 

 in, any such philosophy. Now, it may seem 

 a simple matter to have tabulated the main 

 phenomena of English social and political 



