REVIEWS AND BOOK NOTICES. 
CALIBAN: THE Missine Linx.* — This curious volume of Dr. 
Wilson’s, can nowise be compared with his former works, espec- 
ially the “ Prehistoric Annals of Scotland.” Indeed, doubts con- 
tinually arose, during our perusal of it, whether it really could 
be classed among the many works that of late have appeared, 
scientifically discussing the question of the ape-descent of man. 
This volume consists of fourteen chapters, all quite brief; and but 
eight of them really touching upon that “ missing link,” that he 
assumes the evolutionist to consider as the bridge that crosses the 
chasm now existing between man and his nearest pithecoid rela- 
tive. This link is curiously interwoven, as it were, with Caliban 
of Shakespeare’s Tempest; and we have in the two hundred and 
seventy-one pages of the book, a double essay on evolution and 
poetry, certainly very novel and entertaining, if nothing more; 
“ the object aimed at in the following chapters,” being, according 
to their author, ‘to place the conceptions of modern science in 
relation to the assumed brute progenitor of man, alongside of 
those imaginative picturings, and of the whole world of fancy and 
superstition pertaining to that elder time ; while also, the literary 
excellences, and the textual difficulties of the two dramas of 
_ Shakespeare chiefly appealed to in illustration of the scientific ele- 
ment of inquiry, are made the subjects of careful study.” Dr. 
Wilson has, indeed, placed the conceptions of modern science 
alongside the whole world of fancy, but in doing so has, we think, 
misinterpreted modern science in making the Caliban of Shakes- 
peare’s fancy the embodiment of the former’s sum total of results. 
At the very outset, the author continually refers to the “‘ miss- 
ing link,” the Caliban of Darwin’s fancy, a mere hypothetical being 
to make good that writer’s theory; but the evolutionist does not 
intimate that one, but many, links are gone ; a whole section, if you 
will, in the great chain of being. We doubt not for one moment, 
that Dr. Wilson himself would claim that the Bushman and the 
European were far different genera, had some geological cataclysm 
destroyed the intermediate races ; and would deny their former ex- 
Ee yop ee ae 
*Caliban: The missing Link. By Daniel Wilson, LL.D. London. Macmillan & Co. 
1873. 12mo, pp. 271. 
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