i88i.] Analyses of Booh. 22 § 
“ pointers ” which indicate that man’s origin has been not merely 
human and brutal, but at the same time spiritual and divine. As 
such he enumerates the man-ward progress of our planet, the 
race-development of animals, the phenomena of organic distri- 
bution, the persistency of type, the multiplicity of human origin, 
language, the tendency to beauty, the human faculties, and the 
spiritual faculties. 
Now we are by no means so much in love with “ Natural 
Selection ” as to suppose it capable of accounting for all the 
facts of organic existence, and we are far, very far, from wishing 
to ignore the considerations which Mr. Denton has brought 
forward. It may be mental feebleness on our part, but we do 
not see our way to a purely monistic interpretation of Nature, 
and we fancy that for those who do, or think they do, the future 
may have in store a startling revelation. 
But we find in the author’s arguments much to which we must 
demur. Thus we find him arguing in favour of spontaneous 
generation, or abiogenesis, as it is now officially called. After 
giving an account of the experiments of Tyndall, he proceeds : — • 
“ The experiments of Wyman, Mantagazzi, Bastian, and a host 
of others who have found living beings in sealed glass vessels 
after they had been exposed to a heat much more than sufficient 
to kill germs if they had existed, can never be negatived by such 
experiments as Tyndall’s, were they multiplied a thousand-fold.” 
Now we should regard it as a most splendid triumph if life could 
be produced from inorganic matter under circumstances where 
the intervention of antecedent life was demonstrably impossible. 
But this is precisely what has not been done. Germs are found 
capable of bearing temperatures much higher than had been for- 
merly supposed. But if the exposure of heat is sufficiently high, 
sufficiently prolonged, or often repeated, then no life appears. 
No experimentalist in this direction has had so much practice as 
M. Pasteur, and where the precautions which he indicates have 
been rigorously followed we do not hear of any affirmative 
result. 
Elsewhere we find the existence of “ essentially human facul- 
ties ” adduced in proof of the spiritual origin of man, of his 
being an approximation to a type of perfection. Says the 
author : — “ Phrenology as taught by Dr. J. R. Buchanan is as 
much a true science as geology taught by Sir C. Lyell, and can 
be much more readily demonstrated. This science reveals in 
man the existence of reverence, modesty, benevolence, chastity, 
integrity or conscientiousness, & c.” Now without pointing to 
the discrepancy of the results obained by modern cerebral physi* 
ologists, e.g., Hitzig and Ferrier, from the doctrines of the 
phrenologists, < — without asking why mental faculties should be 
located merely in those portions of the grey matter which under* 
lie some portion of the skull accessible and measurable during 
life, — we may point out that to distinguish, by any clearly-marked 
