300 ©" Recent Literature. [May, 
years of my life, whenever I want cheering, I will look at the 
portraits of my distinguished co-workers in the field of science, 
and remember their generous sympathy. When I die the album 
will be a most precious bequest to my children. I must further 
express my obligation for the very interesting history contained 
in your letter of the progress of opinion in the Netherlands, with 
respect to evolution, the whole of which is quite new to me. 
must again thank all my kind friends from my heart for their 
ever-memorable testimonial, and I remain, sir, your obliged and 
grateful servant, (Signed) CHARLES R. DARWIN. 
RECENT LITERATURE. 
Mrivart’s Lessons FROM Nature.’ — Any one who expects to find 
in this book a series of mild and temperate homilies on the lessons to 
be derived from a study of nature will be disappointed. There is rather 
more said about the works of certain of Professor Mivart’s fellow natu- 
ralists and philosophers than of the works of nature, and the book is 
more polemical than prosy. Herbert Spencer and Professor Huxley 
are criticised, often with good effect, and their weak points — for they 
have them — exposed. But the author in his criticisms of the agnostic 
school of philosophers is a little one-sided. In the present state of phi- 
losophy and science, the attitude of nescience may be a healthy and nat- 
ural one. The author, while in his anatomical workshop using the tools 
of the agnostic, seems when wearing his philosopher's spectacles to look 
at creation in quite a different mood. In his fears of the ultimate prev- 
alence of a purely scientific mode of thinking, he does not take into ac- 
count the low specific gravity and enormous density of the mass of super- 
stition in the world, the wrong thinking, sometimes even amounting to 
insanity, resulting from crude and mistaken pseudo-religious conceptions, 
which have done and will tend to do infinitely more harm to the race 
than the class of conceptions denominated by some writers as agnostic, 
and which must for centuries to come be held by the few. While one 
may not agree with the extreme views of. Spencer, Huxley, and particu- 
larly Haeckel and others who ‘have, as some believe, established a sort 
of “scientific priesthood” with a more or less one-sided, bigoted follow- 
ing, yet the criticisms coming from that quarter will do most efficient 
Service in making men think and feel more rationally. 
It will be gathered from the foregoing remarks that Professor Mivart’s 
Lessons is really a criticism of the evolution school of naturalists by 
one who from being an extreme Darwinian has become a moderate evo- 
lutionist sans any taint of what is known as materialism, and who con- 
1 Lessons from Nature, as manifested in Mind and Matter. By Sr. GEORGE Mi- 
VART. New York: D. Appleton & Son. 1876. 12mo, $2,00. 
