REVIEWS. 
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and the fossils which it contains, sustained by such peculiar showers of 
light as the author imagines. One of the most interesting chapters is that 
headed Protoplasm. In this the author endeavours to attack Professor 
Huxley’s well-known essay in the 11 Fortnightly Review ” (February, 1869), 
and less or more to side with its chief opponents, Professor Lionel Beale and 
Mr. J. H. Stirling. This chapter we shall not dwell on, as we fancy the 
reader, whichever side he takes, will be sure to find it out and read it for 
himself. If he reads it carefully, it is utterly impossible not to see how the 
author confuses and confounds Professor Huxley’s argument, and after all 
gives nothing but plain point-blank assertion in opposition. The reader will 
be amazed, too, to observe that, after using Beale and Stirling against Huxley, 
he himself comes to some conclusion different from both, and which appears 
to us to support the notion of a sort of spiritual organisation which is stand- 
ing up within the ordinary physical being. This part of the work is the 
most palpably ridiculous of the whole, and having noticed it, our readers 
must expect us to go no farther, but to leave the work to them, in the faint 
hope that their verdict may be less severe than ours. 
POPULAR ASTRONOMY.* 
A STRONOMY is very nearly taking the place which years since was 
occupied by the aquarium and marine zoology. The spectrum has lent 
it quite a novel interest, and so much interesting work has been done upon 
the constitution of the sun within the past ten years, that really astronomy 
seems likely to have as great a hold upon the popular mind as any of the 
lighter scientific pursuits. The work before us puts forward, as a special 
claim to popular favour, that it is written in a style to attract the general 
reader; and further, that it contains none of those algebraical studies which 
are common enough in treatises on astronomy, and which frequently drive 
away from the study of the stars those who do not understand either algebra 
or geometry, but who would otherwise gladly learn the constitution of the 
heavens. Such in general terms is the argument of the author, who attempts 
to put astronomy before the reader in as simple and intelligible a manner as 
possible. Still, we must confess that, to our minds, he has not been very 
successful. He has written a book, no doubt, which contains nought but 
what has been over and over again taught in some shape or other ; but his 
style is, in our opinion, utterly unsuited to a popular writer. His sentences 
are very long, some extremely so, and his language is by no means simple ; 
so that though his book might well be read and advantageously studied by 
the fully educated man, we fear much for the great mass of readers to whom 
his work is addressed. Indeed, in this respect it falls far short of Mr. 
Proctor’s splendid work upon the sun, which we recently noticed, being 
neither in the novelty of its matter, nor in the ease of its style, in the 
* “Astronomy Simplified for General Reading,” with numerous new 
Explanations and Discoveries in Spectrum Analyses, &c. &c. By F. A. S. 
Rollwyn. London : William Tegg, 1871. 
