August i, 1885.] The Australasian Scientific Magazine, 23 
science. Bishop Colenso simply lost his head in endeavouring to drive it 
through his hard algebraic formulae against the impregnable wall of scrip- 
tural phraseology, properly interpreted. When he attempted to disprove 
the record which he swore to teach, he was disloyal to his Sovereign and 
to his church. He disputes the increment of population recorded in the 
Old Testament books. Yet nobody can deny the fact that the Anglo-Saxon 
race has, since about 150 years ago, multiplied more than tenfold. This, 
spite of all the wars which have cut down now and again the flower of our 
youth ; the internecine slaughter of the North and the South in America 
within our own recent times, for example. 
I think Colenso once calculated the fecundity of a pair of rabbits, living 
under ordinary circumstances. The numbers he found probably existing 
at the expiry of five years, could only be stated in millions. It is thus 
evident that but for war, and its follower pestilence, the world would now 
be overcrowded altogether. Malthus was only, after all, a poor imitator of 
the old Spartans. Kill the weakly ones and let the strong live was the dogma 
of the Spartan melthusian days, principally among some to whom little 
brain and considerable leisure has been vouchsafed. Out of his own 
mouth I think Bishop Colenso is convicted of misinterpretation of the 
Book of Books he swore to interpret. 
Now, at the present time, the more our armies have sought to mow 
down the hordes in the Soudan and elsewhere, the richer is the crop. As 
it was in the days of Joshua so is it now. A bloody field is fought. A 
pestilence stalks over the land. Yet the country devastated flourishes again, 
and, spite of all, its population is scarcely reduced to any appreciable 
degree. 
I now close this discursive paper, written in the turmoil of daily work, 
simply asking my readers, of whom I hope there will be many, to study 
side by side their science, no matter how deep, no matter how speculative, 
with the Scripture as it is given to us in the Old and New Testaments, and 
the more they ponder over the alleged conflict between the revelation of 
our Nineteenth Century science and the plain facts in the Scriptures, the 
more certain they will be 1 9 reconcile the one with the other, and the 
less will they stumble in the dark into holes and quagmires prepared for 
them by those who have become proficient in “ science, falsely so called/’ 
