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with persons afflicted with colour-blindness, we cannot be 
blamed for saying, “ We regret that your view of the world 
invests everything with the hues of universal drab, in which 
it is your misfortune to behold the fair face of Creation 
shrouded ; but we do not submit to be taught by you, whose 
vision is imperfect, that you are the only persons capable of 
painting landscapes, or of writing poetry.” 
The First Home of Mankind. 
Philosophy is, at present, attempting to furnish us with a 
quite new history of religion. By investigating the written 
religious books of the East, and evolving much out of her own 
consciousness, she hopes to understand the gradual steps by 
which man slowly worked himself up to the conception of 
“ the Infinite.” She will then (it is hoped) be able to present 
this conception in a new and clearer light, — a quite fresh 
crystallisation of the idea (as the chemists would say), free 
from Jewish and Christian mother -liquor, and we shall then be 
able to do correct homage to that hitherto misunderstood 
“ something which, external to ourselves, makes for righteous- 
ness ” ! 
In the meantime, the testimony of the sacred Scriptures is 
quietly ignored, and the modern instructors of our race tell us 
that “ it is supposed that man first appeared in a land now 
beneath the Indian Ocean ” ! 
It is not too much to say that not the slightest ground 
exists for such a supposition. Like other of the dreams of 
philosophy, it rests on no solid proof whatever. “ I see no 
difficulty in believing ” has become the creed chanted in full 
chorus by Darwin and his disciples. This theory is wholly 
opposed to the most recent researches of science. 
In the recently-published first volume of the publication of 
the Challenger, Sir Wyville Thomson informs us, as the result 
of the deep-sea sounding, that * 
“ There does not seem to be a shadow of reason for sup- 
posing that the gently undulating plains, extending for over 
a hundred millions of square miles, at a depth of 2,500 
fathoms beneath the surface of the sea, and presenting, like 
the land, their local areas of secular elevation and depression, 
and their centres of more active volcanic disturbance, were ever 
raised, at all events in mass, above the level of the sea ; such 
an arrangement, indeed, is inconceivable.” 
# Quoted from Nature of Nov. 11th, 1880. 
