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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
“We know that the organic and inorganic worlds have been formed 
by a thoughtful reasoning being ; but the * how ’ or 1 why ’ are hidden 
among the mysteries of Omnipotence . . . .” and further, Dr. Bree having 
nearly exhausted his vocabulary of abusive epithets against Mr. Darwin and 
those who believe with him, says of the Darwinian theory that u if proved in 
every point to be true, it would still leave the fact of special creation in all 
its wonderful mystery. The organic cannot be formed from the inorganic ; 
nor could the organic, even if it were so formed, be endowed by any physical 
force with the laws and properties of life. Go on still in speculation, and I 
ask whence the inorganic — its beginning, its ending, its grand and inexplicable 
laws, which the physicist in vain attempts to correlate with the vital? 
whence gravitation, and what ? the sidereal system and its movements ? the 
spirit that breathes, through illimitable space, and lives through an eternity 
of time ? ” 
To a shallow mind it may seem a very grandiose speculation, but suppose 
we go further, and assuming the existence of the Creator, ask the author 
whence did he come, what answer will he give ? We dislike this kind of 
speculation intensely, it carries the narrow-minded person off his balance, 
but to the man of thought it is simply the verbose and shallow wanderings 
of a mind which has not yet arrived at the conclusion that the whole subject 
he has been talking of is most probably for ever removed from the specula- 
tions of man. It is an absurd wandering from the matter of animal life and 
from the very simple though yet unproven question, whence comes man, from 
the apes or from mud ? 
AIR AND RAIN.* 
H ERE we have a book which is new in its subject and mode of treat- 
ment; and it is a large one too, extending over more than five 
hundred pages. What shall we say of it ? Is it good or bad, too long or 
too short ; too much confined to facts without deductions ; or given to 
over-extended generalisations, to the exclusion of accurate observation ? 
We must answer these several questions by stating that the work appears 
to us a good one, but unsuited either to the general reader or to the 
scientific man. It is unsatisfactory for the former because of the quantity 
of tabular matter which is introduced into its pages, and to the latter 
because the author indulges in a great series of observations which are 
not clearly put, and which are intended for general audiences. Still, it 
seems to us to be a good book : it is one with which we have hardly a single 
fault to find ; and we give the author the highest praise for the manly and 
fearless manner in which he has in all cases spoken his mind, and for the 
intense labour which the work must have entailed by reason of the nume- 
rous analyses which it contains of air and water made over every portion of 
the kingdom. It would be a labour without end to attempt anything like 
a full notice of the author’s various and manifold researches. We shall 
* 11 Air and Rain : the Beginnings of a Chemical Climatology.” By 
Robert Angus Smith, Ph.D., F.R.S., F.C.S. London : Longmans, 1872. 
