of favorable conditions at the present day, and which might probably have been more easily effected when the Persian Gulf extended further north. Hence, the recourse to the "glacial epoch" for some event which might colorably represent a flood, distinctly asserted by the only authority for it to have occurred in historical times. is peculiarly unfortunate. Even a Welsh antiquarian might hesitate over the supposition that a tradition of the fate of Moel Tryfaen, in the glacial epoch, had furnished the basis of fact for a legend which arose among people whose experience abundantly supplied them with the needful precedents. Moreover, if evidence of interchanges of land and sea are to be accepted as "confirmations" of Noah's deluge, there are plenty of sources for the tradition to be had much nearer than Wales.

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The depression now filled by the Red Sea, for example, appears to be, geologically, of very recent origin. The later deposits found on its shores two or three hundred feet above the sea level contain no remains older than those of the present fauna; while, as I have already mentioned, the valley of the adjacent delta of the Nile was a gulf of the sea in miocene times. But there is not a particle of evidence that the change of relative level which admitted the waters of the Indian Ocean between Arabia and Africa, took place any faster than that which is now going on in Greenland and in Scandinavia, and which has left their inhabitants undisturbed. Even more remarkable changes were effected, toward the end of, or since, the glacial epoch, over the region now occupied by the Levantine Mediterranean and the Egean Sea. The eastern coast region of Asia Minor, the western of Greece, and many of the intermediate islands, exhibit thick masses of stratified deposits of later tertiary age and of purely lacustrine characters; and it is remarkable that, on the south side of the island of Crete, such masses present steep cliffs facing the sea, so that the southern boundary of the lake in which they were formed must have been situated where the sea now flows. deed, there are valid reasons for the supposition that the dry land once extended far to the west of the present Levantine coast, and not improbably forced the Nile to seek an outlet to the north-east of its present delta-a possibility of no small

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importance in relation to certain puzzling facts of geographical distribution. any rate, continuous land joined Asia Minor with the Balkan peninsula; and its surface bore deep freshwater lakes, apparently disconnected with the PontoAralian sea. This state of things lasted long enough to allow of the formation of the thick lacustrine strata to which I have referred. I am not aware that there is the smallest ground for the assumption that Ægean land was broken up in consequence of any of the "catastrophes" which are so commonly invoked.* For anything that appears to the contrary, the narrow steep-sided straits between the islands of the Egean archipelago may have been. originally brought about by ordinary atmospheric and stream action, and filled from the Mediterranean, during a slow submergence proceeding from the south northwards. The strait of the Dardanelles is bounded by undisturbed pleistocene strata forty feet thick, through which, to all appearance, the present passage has been quietly cut.

That Olympus and Ossa were torn asunder and the waters of the Thessalian basin poured forth, is a very ancient notion, and an often cited "confirmation" of Deucalion's flood.

It has not yet

about the "6 glacial epoch" to the question of the historical veracity of the narrator of the story of the Noachian deluge? So far as my knowledge goes, there is not a particle of evidence that destructive inundations were more cominon over the general surface of the earth in the glacial epoch, than they have been before or since. No doubt the fringe of an icecovered region is always liable to them; but, if we examine the records of such catastrophes in historical times, those produced in the deltas of great rivers, or in lowlands like Holland, by sudden floods, combined with gales of wind or with unusual tides, far excel all others.

With respect to such inundations as are the consequences of earthquakes, and other slight movements of the crust of the earth, I have never heard of anything to show that they were more frequent and severer in the quaternary or tertiary epochs than they are now. In the discussion of these, as of all other geological problems, the appeal to needless catastrophes is born of that impatience of the slow and painful search after sufficient causes in the ordinary course of nature which is a temptation to all, though only energetic ignorance nowadays completely succumbs to it.-Nineteenth Century.

POSTSCRIPT.

My best thanks are due to Mr. Gladstone for his courteous withdrawal of one of the statements to which I have thought it needful to take exception. The familiarity with controversy to which Mr. Gladstone alludes, will have accustomed him to the misadventures which arise when, as sometimes will happen in the heat of fence, the buttons come off the foils. I trust that any scratch he may have received will heal as quickly as my own flesh wounds have done.

A contribution to the last number of this Re. view of a different order would be left unnoticed, were it not that my silence would convert me into an accessory to misrepresentations of a very grave character. However, I shall restrict myself to the barest possible statement of facts, leaving my readers to draw their own conclusions.

In an article entitled "A Great Lesson," published in this Review for September, 1887: (1) The Duke of Argyll says the "overthrow of Darwin's speculations" (p. 301) concerning the origin of coral reefs, which he fancied had taken place, had been received by men of science" with a grudging silence as far as public discussion is concerned" (p. 301).

The truth is that, as every one acquainted with the literature of the subject was well

aware, the views supposed to have effected this overthrow had been fully and publicly Geikie, Green and Prestwich in this country; discussed by Dana in the United States; by by Lapparent in France; and by Credner in Germany.

(2) The Duke of Argyll says" that no serious reply has ever been attempted" (p. 305). The truth is that the highest living authority on the subject, Professor Dana, published a most weighty reply, two years before the Duke of Argyll committed himself to this statement.

(3) The Duke of Argyll uses the preceding products of defective knowledge, multiplied by excessive imagination, to illustrate the manner in which certain accepted opinions" establish a sort of Reign of Terror in their own behalf" (p. 307).

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The truth is that no plea, except that of total ignorance of the literature of the subject, can excuse the errors cited, and that the "Reign of Terror" is a purely subjective phenomenon.

(4) The letter in "Nature," for the 17th of November, 1887, to which I am referred, contains neither substantiation, nor retractation, of statements 1 and 2. Nevertheless, it repeats number 3. The Duke of Argyll says of his article that it "has done what I intended

it to do. It has called wide attention to the influence of mere authority in establishing erroneous theories and in retarding the progress of scientific truth."

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(5) The Duke of Argyll illustrates the influ. ence of his fictitious "Reign of Terror" by the statement that Mr. John Murray was strongly advised against the publication of his views in derogation of Darwin's long-accepted theory of the coral islands, and was actually induced to delay it for two years'' (p. 307). And in "Nature" for the 17th of November, 1887, the Duke of Argyll states that he has seen a letter from Sir Wyville Thomson in which he "urged and almost insisted that Mr. Murray should withdraw the reading of his papers on the subject from the Royal Society of Edinburgh. This was in February 177." The next paragraph, however, contains the confession: No special reason was assigned." The Duke of Argyll proceeds to give a specu lative opinion that "Sir Wyville dreaded some injury to the scientific reputation of the body of which he was the chief." Truly, a very probable supposition; but as Sir Wyville Thomson's tendencies were notoriously antiDarwinian, it does not appear to me to lend the slightest justification to the Duke of Argyle's insinuation that the Darwinian "terror" influenced him. However, the question was finally set at rest by a letter which ap. peared in Nature" (29th of December, 1887) in which the writer says that:

talking with Sir Wyville about 'Murray's new theory,' I asked what objection he had to its being brought before the public? The answer simply was: he considered that the grounds of the theory had not, as yet, been sufficiently investigated or sufficiently corroborated, and that therefore any immature, dogmatic publication of it would do less than little service either to science or to the author of the paper."

A FRENCH author addresses, or may address, directly in their own tongue some seventy million human souls at most. Indeed, this is a very inclusive estimate, for I throw in all Belgium, whether Flemish or French-speaking, with a liberal allowance for Gallic Switzerland, Canada, Haiti; and I deduct nothing at all from the total sum (since I hate subtraction) for the mass of Southern Frenchmen who can speak or read no language save Provençal, nor yet for the remnant of German Alsace, for La Bretagne Bretonnante, for the Basques of the Pyrenees, for the Italians of Corsica, for the Arabs and Kabyles and Berbers of Algeria. In reality, were I disposed to be strict, a modest estimate of forty-five million people who have used French from childhood as their mother-tongue would be far nearer the mark than the generous figures I here assign them. But let that pass. We will allow for argument's sake, just to prevent unpleasantness, that a French novelist, poet, rhetorician, or thinker addresses directly an audience of some seventy millions. Well, and an English author addresses directly, in Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, America, a roughly estimated audience of at least one hundred and ten million souls. He speaks to the greatest theatre the world has ever known. His breast swells with manly pride as he thinks of his Mission. From his stage in London he scatters his words broadcast to all the four winds of heaven, to be wafted on the breeze (or, more practically, in the mail-bags) to the uttermost parts of the earth, from the Shetlands to New Zealand, from Labrador to California, from Jamaica to Mauritius, from the Cape of Good Hope to Honolulu and Fiji and British Columbia.

But with what effect? Ah, there comes the difference! We may blush to admit it. France is an almost restrictedly European republic, with a dwindling native population of forty million souls; England is the centre of a world-wide empire, which has colonized enormous tracts of all the outlying continents, and absorbed in its colonies, revolted or faithful, the entire overflow of other tongues and

races. Yet a French author addresses at once a vast ready-made auditory over the civilized earth; while an English author addresses at best but his own fellowspeakers in Europe, America, and Australia. Not only are Renan and Daudet known and read wherever printed books can penetrate, but even very young men (as we count youth nowadays), like Paul Bourget and Guy de Maupassant, can achieve at one blow a European reputation. Whereas English men of lettersas distinguished from English men of science-rarely attain any celebrity at all, at least during their own lifetime, outside the narrow limits of their essentially provincial English-speaking world.

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That," the suburban critic interposes glibly, with the easy confidence begotten of plentiful want of thought, "that is, of course, because everybody every where learns at least to read French, while comparatively few foreigners ever learn to read English." You think so? Well, so be it. I fancied, my friend, you would raise offhand that cheap and ineffective solution of a hard problem. But, then, how about Russian? Tolstoi, Dostoieffski, Tourgénieff, and the rest are so much appreciated and admired in Western Europe, I suppose, because all of us know how to read and speak Russian so fluently! familiar acquaintance with the Scandinavian dialects forms an integral part of a polite education, of course; which is why all the world goes wild about Ibsen. tleman can hardly confess to a complete ignorance of Provençal; and that explains the vogue accorded to Mireio. What nonsense! The plain truth is this-it matters little nowadays in what language a man delivers himself, provided only he has something to say that interests the nations. Given that prime factor, and the greedy translator pounces upon his work from afar off, like the hawk upon the laverock. You may read Herbert Spencer nowadays in Japanese or Gujerati; and my friend Edward Clodd has seen his graceful and beautiful Childhood of the World rendered not only into the Finnish tongue but also into the guttural clicks of the Bechuana Kaffirs.

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Yet the fact remains that, while the English author addresses at first hand the largest audience in the world, fewer English authors are known outside the Englishspeaking people than Scandinavians or Russians. It is quite true, the names alone of a few icy peaks in our contemporary literature, now hoary with age and clogged with gathering glaciers, may be freely heard in Continental salons. Even Frenchmen are probably aware that we possess a Tennyson-perhaps (though there I am more doubtful) a Morris, a Meredith, a Froude, a Swinburne. But nobody on the Continent really reads English books (except in science and philosophy); nobody certainly ever opens an English novel. Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Tyndall, Thompson, are names as familiar throughout Europe as in Burlington House itself. Not so our contemporary poets, romance-writers, essayists. They address at best England, America, Australia. With that magnificent audience ready-made for their effusions, not an echo of their voice ever transcends for a moment the provincial bounds of Greater Britain.

It's always a pleasure to me to agree with Mr. Stead, with whom one can so often and so amicably differ; and I agree with him cordially in his profound belief in the glorious future reserved for the Anglo-Celtic race. The world is to the young, says the Servian proverb; and England shows its perennial youth to the present day, by being fruitful and multiplying and replenishing the earth, which no effete organism, be it man or nation, ever yet through all time has succeeded in doing. The English-speaking writer ought, therefore, to have the whole world at his feet. Instead of that, he is ousted on his own ground, often enough, by the Zolas and the Gaboriaus, the Tolstois and the Ibsens. It's easier to boom a Basque poet or a Queen of Roumania than to gain attention abroad for an English writer. And why? Not surely because English writers have nothing to say ideas spring as thick and as spontaneous on English soil, I verily believe, as on Muscovite steppes or Norwegian fiords-Britain pullulates with genius but because that Philistine English spirit which Mr. Stead adores effectually nips those ideas in the bud, before they have ever the chance of bursting into flower and bringing forth kindly fruits in due season.

In England, indeed, literature has a strange environment. No rare plant ever throve on stonier soil. It is Bohemia in Philistia, a little archipelago of island specks that fleck a vast wide sea of stag. nant indifference. The man of letters in Britain lives and moves and has his being in an alien world, that distrusts and dislikes him. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not. For we English, owing in part to ethnical causes, in part to that singular isolation of our component classes which Matthew Arnold deplored-itself, as I believe, a result of imperfect ethnical intermixture-we English consist of more sharply demarcated intellectual and æsthetic grades than any other people on earth one has seen or read of. Nobody could ever have asked about Englishmen, as the French wit asked about Germans, si un anglais peut avoir de l'esprit. Genius, intelligence, humor, brilliancy, cleverness, exist among us in rank abundance. But they exist for all that as comparative exceptions. No nation produces more; but no nation produces them in such strange isolation. The mass of our middle class is as dull as ditch-water or the dullest German. The exceptions are almost as sparkling as champagne or the most sparkling Frenchman. And between the two extremes there are but few gradations. What we lack, in a word, is not men of genius, but a large appreciative and critical body of the general public.

Now, English literature is all, in the main, and roughly speaking, produced in England. The thirty millions do the thinking and writing for the hundred and ten. McKinley has failed to protect occidental culture. There is an American literature, it is true; but it is relatively insignificant in amount for a population of over fifty millions, and most of it is modelled on native English forms. With few exceptions, indeed Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Walt Whitman-the best of it rings but a faint echo of Britannic murmurs, thrives feebly as a Bostonian exotic, nursed with studious care in the artificial hothouses of the Back Bay and the halls of Harvard. There is even beginning to be in a certain vague and formless way, as of the evolving jelly-fish, some rudimentary foreshadowing of Australian and Canadian literature. But these formative efforts on the part of the outlying members of the