1882.] 
Correspondence . 
47 
faults. And probably "under these again would be other sets. 
I am strongly inclined, therefore, to believe it to be owing to 
causes ending finally in local compression, or yielding fluctuation 
of strata, waves, in a rough sense, of semi-fluidified strata. — I 
am, &c., 
D. Y. C. 
Leeds, December 2, 1881. 
PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON ANIMISTIC 
HYPOTHESES. 
To the Editor of the Journal of Science . 
Sir, — Perhaps, in the interest of Modern Medicine, you could 
kindly spare so much space in an early issue of the “Journal of 
Science ” as will enable me to direCt attention to a fallacy 
involved in an assertion of Mr. Higgins, in the “ Correspondence ” 
columns of your last number, while traversing Professor Huxley’s 
contention in a LeCture before the late Medical Congress, “ that 
contemporary physiological science is antagonistic to Animism.” 
Your learned correspondent holds “ that in our modes of thought 
and expression we cannot help being animistic, and that in 
Biology ‘ mimicry ’ cannot be expressed except in terms of 
Animism.” But surely a little reflection will satisfy even Mr. 
Higgins himself that the very reverse is the case, and that we 
cannot express animistic ideas except in terms which belong to 
Hylozoism, the nomenclature of Immaterialism being strictly 
materialistic. The very term Anima itself, Spirit , Soul, God , 
Ghost , Psyche, Pneuma, Angel, Heaven, and even Idea (vision), 
have all primarily a materialistic and temporal, or physical and 
somatic, derivation and signification. Vain are all our attempts 
to escape from the mechanism of our anatomy ; a vanity which 
seems, conclusively, to answer Mr. Higgins’s challenge to Prof. 
Huxley, by giving mechanical (histological) rationalia for all so- 
called animistic phenomena.—I am, &c., 
Robert Lewins, M.D. 
Army and Navy Club, December 5, 1881. 
