Notices of New Books. 



7865 



Notices of New Books. 



c The Romance of Natural History.'' By Philip Henry Gosse, 

 F.R.S. Second Series. London : James Nisbet & Co., 21, Ber- 

 ners Street. 1861. 390 pp. letterpress : nine plates. 



It is very curious to observe what particular articles of faith indivi- 

 dual naturalists adopt. The British Museum believes in meteoric 

 stones, but rejects sea serpents; the ' Zoologist,' on the contrary, 

 believes in sea serpents and thinks every meteoric stone a hoax ; one 

 man pooh-poohs the cow-sucking propensities of the hedgehog, but 

 cherishes, as the apple of his eye, a belief that a toad can exist without 

 any inconvenience for some ten thousand years in a block of granite ; 

 many a man has witnessed showers of fish, but thinks the showers of 

 frogs altogether apocryphal ; all sailor naturalists believe in mermaids, 

 but all landsmen naturalists consider these tales the merest rubbish. 

 It would be most interesting to study the phrenological development 

 of each believer; to inquire why one man should believe in ghosts, 

 another in meteoric iron : why he should call it lunar iron I can easily 

 conceive, for, on the principle that love tinges every object with its own 

 rosy hue, so the mind, impregnated with lunar influence, will impart a 

 lunar character of every object on which it reflects. But why should 

 a man believe in lunar iron and reject a mermaid ? or believe in a mer- 

 maid and reject a sea serpent ? or believe in a sea serpent and reject 

 the immortality of toads ? or believe in the immortality of toads and 

 " pooh-pooh " the abundantly proven fact that vipers swallow and dis- 

 gorge their interesting progeny at pleasure ? Some bump of general 

 credulity must be common to all such believers, but surely there 

 should be a peculiar development of brain for each particular belief: 

 a man must needs have a " capacious vaulted cranium " to invest 

 a seal with the gigantic proportions of a sea serpent. Mr. Gosse 

 is the only naturalist who believes in everything ; he seems specially 

 retained by the marvellous, and pleads its cause wherever he finds the 

 least scrap of legendary lore that he can convert into a brief. He 

 makes out a triumphant case for the showers of fishes (chap, 2); he 

 leaves the traducers of mermaids as destitute of a leg to stand on as 

 as the mermaids themselves (chap. 3) ; he shows that toads can endure 

 hunger, thirst and suffocation for a few thousand years with perfect 

 impunity (chap. 4) ; and what is still more strange, when accidentally 

 exhumed, they exactly resemble their fellows of the present generation 

 of toads: thus giving a severe, but we 'trust unintentional, blow to 

 VOL. XX. G 



