KEYIEWS. 
295 
THE BEGINNING.* 
T HERE are among the lower strata of the world of scientific men certain 
persons who, without a sufficient knowledge of what has been done, 
have yet very definite and distinct views, which they imagine are all 
rigidly true and correct. Such men are generally looked up to by the 
inferior class among whom they travel, and they very seldom go amongst 
their superiors in knowledge. Of such a class astronomers are, to those who 
have to do with journalism, a tolerably familiar group. There is the man 
who, with a certain knowledge of geometry, has sought to prove that the 
earth stands still, and the sun does the work which most of us attribute to 
the earth. Then there is the author who delights to find comets of a sub- 
stantial character, and the man who proves finding the sun’s distance by no 
means like what it is represented to be, and so on. Now, of a similar class — 
but it must be confessed with much more learning at his hand, and with a 
far greater degree of reason at his call — is the author of the present volume. 
Mr. Ponton is not of the lunatic class of most of the authors to whom we 
have referred. His book is only a little unreasonable ; it is by no means 
badly written, and to the general reader it contains a considerable deal of 
information. But so far as anything novel is concerned, the book is 
absolutely and completely barren ; it has not a single fact that is new, nor 
anything worthy of serious consideration in the shape of ideas or reflections. 
Nor does the title convey a proper idea of the nature of the book, for it has 
very little to do with the beginning j and what the author’s aim has been in 
accumulating together, in a book ostensibly upon the universe, such a series 
of plates respecting diatomacece desmidece, and their allies, we cannot for a 
moment imagine. It seems to us as if the author was a microscopist ; and 
that, having written a work on such a gigantic subject as the universe, he 
thought it a pity not to make it include the sum-total of his labours. 
Such, it appears to us, must have been his idea; and if the conjecture be 
correct, we cannot blame him too much for so utterly senseless a proceeding. 
We must do Mr. Adlard the justice to say that the plates in the volume 
are exceedingly well drawn, and are very good representations of the struc- 
tures they are intended for j indeed, tout entier, this is the best part of the 
work. 
Of the contents of the book we know not well what to say. The first 
few chapters — on the antiquity of matter, the terraqueous globe, solar energy, 
&c. — contain few blunders, and are well written, and interesting general 
reading. Of course, in regard to the sun, the matter is comparatively 
speaking old, and the information conveyed inaccurate in some cases ; but 
altogether this part of the volume is not so bad. When we come to the 
more essentially animal part of the volume, we find the author putting forth 
his own ideas more freely and more frequently. It is true that a greal deal 
of this part of the book is taken from that admirable treatise of De 
Quatrefages, on the “ Metamorphoses of Man and Animals,” and so far is 
* 11 The Beginning : its When and its How.” By Mungo Ponton, 
F.R.S.E. London : Longmans, 1871. 
