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excellent ; but a great deal is taken from other less authoritative works, and 
is mixed together with the author’s own speculations. Finally, the last 
part of the work deals with the author’s own ideas on the first chapter of 
Genesis, and treats upon its successive creative epochs and the divine 
authority of the Hebrew records. On this portion we must distinctly decline 
to enter. 
A few quotations will represent what we have said of the author’s original 
ideas better than any words of ours j and they will put the reader, too, more t 
thoroughly in acquaintance with some of Mr. Ponton’s notions. In en- 
deavouring to prove the existence of a human soul, he argues as follows : 
u Take the familiar case of human thought. Man cannot exercise his intel- 
lectual any more than he can his physical powers, without food ; but the 
food ought not, therefore, to be regarded as the origin or cause of his thoughts. , 
Neither can thoughts be deemed the representative of the food. The two 
things are incommensurable, and incapable of mutual comparison. It can- 
not be affirmed that a pound of food will produce so much thought, in 
anything like the same sense in which we can say that a pound of food will 
produce a certain equivalent of muscular action ; or that a pound of fuel 
will produce so much heat, which may be employed to raise a certain weight 
a foot high. The food, in its relation to thought, acts somewhat like the 
spark applied to the powder magazine. The vast mechanical force attend- 5 
ing the explosion represents the motive energy, not of the tiny spark, but 
of that statical power which was treasured up in the gunpowder. So human 
thought does not represent the food digested in the human stomach, but is • 
the result of the innate 'power with which God has endowed the living being man. jl 
It is in the motions requisite to maintain the mechanism of his organisms, 
and those which he voluntarily performs, that we are to seek the equivalents r 
of the physical energy imparted by the food which he digests and oxygen , 
which he inhales. But his thoughts are something beyond all these, and 
are the manifestations of man’s inherent powers as a rational living being ” 
We do not care to waste space in analysing the preceding passages, for any ' 
of our readers can do it for himself. At the very utmost, all the writer was 
justified in asserting was, that he did not know anything further about the 
question of thought ; but the manifest absurdity of the argument in favour | 
of a soul is clear enough, from the fact that it applies with as much force to a 
parrot or a crocodile as to man. Another, and somewhat more extraordinary ; 
effusion of Mr. Ponton, may be found in his observations on the coal measures, J 
which he supposes to have taken their origin long before the period of the * 
formation of the sun. He says : 11 Looking, then, to the peculiar characters 
of the vegetation buried in the coal formation, to the difference in the condi- 
tions of climate which must have prevailed on the globe while it flourished, 
and to the immense remoteness of the epoch when those needful conditions 
were likely to have subsisted, it becomes a highly probable conclusion, that 
that earliest vegetation clothed the surface of the earth long before the sun had 
begun to shine upon our globe — being sustained by those luminous and thermal 
vibrations which have been shown to have partially existed as the earliest 
of all physical phenomena, and before the establishment of any centres of 
motive energy.” To this geological theory we have only to express our 
utter amazement at the marvellous workmanship of the coal formations 
