man, in this degenerate nineteenth century than he was either in the Europe of the middle ages or in the Athens of classical antiquity.Daily Telegraph.

THE

of

STARS AND STRIPES."-Not many our readers probably are aware that the famous "Stars and Stripes" of the United States are of English origin. The East and West Junction Railway Company have published a novel guide, illustrated by photographs, under the title of "Shakespeare's Country and the Ancestral Home of the Washingtons," which speaks of Sulgrave as the ancestral home of the Washington family, from whom sprang the renowned Father of his Country,' George Washington, first President of the United States, and from whose coat-of-armis, still to be seen in the village, the American bannerthe famous 'Stars and Stripes '—took its origin. lies about three miles to the south-west of Morton Pinkney, in a secluded valley on the left-hand side of the road leading to Banbury.... Just outside the village, standing about two fields back from the road, is the ancient manor-house erected by Laurence Washington about the year 1560, still bearing on the spandrils of the outer porch his coat-ofarms, the Stars and Stripes,' inscribed on a shield, with his crest, a raven, above it."

·

THE TWO TEMPERAMENTS.-Marseilles is not the right place for studying the character of the southerner any more than Maubeuge is adapted for examining the peculiarities of the northerner. Their respective qualities and faults are only really to be adequately appreciated in such a centre as Paris. The idiosyncrasies of the méridional among his fellows, or of the northerner in his own land, are but dimly discerned. It is on the Boulevard des Italiens that the physiologist should level his lorgnette, and endeavor to detect among the passers-by the man born under the sun of Provence or the moon of Flanders. I will refrain from boring you with the information that the southern man is exuberant, demonstrative, swarthy of skin, swaggering of gait, mirthful, extravagant, noisy, and boastful; nor need I tell you that the man of the north is cold, reserved, formal, disdainful, and reticent. You have been told that over and over again. Let us penetrate a little deeper under their skin. The Parisian of the south is remarkable for an excessive love of self-advertisement. He must

he talked about; he likes to be seen, to shine, to write letters to the newspapers, and to inform the public of everything he is thinking, plan

ning, preparing, eating, drinking. He seeks to occupy attention even in the merest trifles, and if he refuses an invitation to dinner he will contrive to let all the world into the secret. Everybody's friend, all his equals are affection"'old-felately and familiarly addressed, and lowed" by him in the second person singular, and he shakes hands with every Parisian notability who will let him. Frequently he has managed to lose the accent he brought with him. from Provence or Toulouse, but you are pretty sure to find it again in his gesticulations and gait. The man of the north, on the other hand, aims at distinction and correctness of bearing. He is a prig, and he poses. Generally affected, he endeavors to appear modest with his inferiors and scornful with his superiors. In society he keeps on the alert, refuses to talk, and seems to avoid self-assertion. The man of the south is somewhat a trifler; but, whether it be from ostentation or temperament, he is generous, cares not for money-grubbing, and for the most part does some good about him. If he have wit he scatters it lavishly; if he have money he spends royally. The northerner, on the other hand, is always a man of business, even when he is an artist or a man of letters. He reckons everything. A man of wealth, and he will scarcely be free from avarice; a wit, and he will sell his jokes. When the méridional comes up to Paris he does not lose his love for his native place, but is clannish and helps his own folk, and at one period France was in the hands of the Toulousains. The men of the south help and admire each other, and grow eloquent over each other's worth and talents, and hold banquets, at which they meet at fixed periods to thee and thou one another in the native dialect. The men of the north are more selfish. They do not know one another. When once the church steeple is abandoned under whose shadow they were born they mix with the people about them and with whom they assimilate. They have no national tongue. The man of the south is a méridional rather than a Frenchman. The man of the north is a Frenchman rather than a northerner, and becomes a Parisian, while the southerner always remains a Marseillais, Bordelais, or Toulousain. You can run down his own province to a man of the north as much as you like, but I wouldn't advise you to try on the same game with a Provençal. It was at Marseilles that the local patriot exclaimed : Ah! if Paris only possessed the Canabière it would be nearly as imposing as Marseilles"-words scarcely likely to be heard elsewhere.-Figaro.

IN the opening sentences of a contribution to the last number of this Review, the Duke of Argyll has favored me with a lecture on the proprieties of controversy, to which I should be disposed to listen with more docility if his Grace's precepts appeared to me to be based upon rational principles, or if his example were more exemplary.

With respect to the latter point, the Duke has thought fit to entitle his article

Professor Huxley on Canon Liddon," and thus forces into prominence an element of personality which those who read the paper which is the object of the Duke's animadversions will observe I have endeavored, most carefully, to avoid. My criticisms dealt with a report of a sermon, published in a newspaper, and thereby addressed to all the world. Whether that sermon was preached by A or B was not a matter of the smallest consequence; and I went NEW SERIES.-VOL. XLV., No. 6

as its rights. The clergy of a State Church enjoy many advantages over those of unprivileged and unendowed religious persuasions, but they lie under a correlative responsibility to the State, and to every member of the body politic. I am not aware that any sacredness attaches to sermons. If preachers stray beyond the doctrinal limits set by lay lawyers, the Privy Council will see to it; and, if they think fit to use their pulpits for the promulgation of literary, or historical, or scientific errors, it is not only the right, but the duty, of the humblest layman, who may happen to be better informed, to correct the evil effects of such perversion of the opportunities which the State affords them and such misuse of the authority which its support lends them. Whatever else it may claim to be, in its relations with the State, the Established Church is a branch of the Civil Service; and, for those who repudiate the ecclesiastical authority of the clergy, they are merely civil servants, as much responsible to the English people for the proper performance of their duties as any others.

The Duke of Argyll tells us that the work and calling" of the clergy prevent them from "pursuing disputation as others can.' I wonder if his Grace ever reads the so-called religious newspapers. It is not an occupation which I should commend to any one who wishes to employ his time profitably; but a very short devotion to this exercise will suffice to convince him that the pursuit of disputation," carried to a degree of acrimony and vehemence unsurpassed in lay controversies, seems to be found quite compatible with the work and calling" of a remarkably large number of the clergy.

"

Finally, it appears to me that nothing can be in worse taste than the assumption that a body of English gentlemen can, by any possibility, desire that immunity from criticism which the Duke of Argyll claims for them. Nothing would be more personally offensive to me than the supposition that I shirked criticism, just or unjust, of any lecture I ever gave. I should be utterly ashamed of myself if, when I stood up as an instructor of others, I had not taken every pains to assure myself of the truth of that which I was about to

say; and I should feel myself bound to be even more careful with a popular assembly, who would take me more or less on trust, than with an audience of competent and critical experts.

I decline to assume that the standard of morality, in these matters, is lower among the clergy than it is among scientific men. I refuse to think that the priest who stands up before a congregation as the minister and interpreter of the Divinity is less careful in his utterances, less ready to meet adverse comment, than the layman who comes before his audience as the minister and interpreter of nature. Yet what should we think of the man of science who, when his ignorance or his carelessness was exposed, whined about the want of delicacy of his critics, or pleaded his "work and calling" as a reason for being let alone?

No man, nor any body of men, is good enough, or wise enough, to dispense with the tonic of criticism. Nothing has done more harm to the clergy than the practice, too common among laymen, of regarding them, when in the pulpit, as a sort of chartered libertines, whose divagations are not to be taken seriously. And I am well assured that the distinguished divine, to whom the sermon is attributed, is the last person who would desire to avail himself of the dishonoring protection which has been superfluously thrown over him.

So much for the lecture on propriety. But the Duke of Argyll, to whom the hortatory style seems to come naturally, does me the honor to make my sayings the subjects of a series of other admonitions, some on philosophical, some on geological, some on biological topics. I can but rejoice that the Duke's authority in these matters is not always employed to show that I am ignorant of them; on the contrary, I meet with an amount of agreement, even of approbation, for which I proffer such gratitude as may be due, even if that gratitude is sometimes almost overshadowed by surprise.

I am unfeignedly astonished to find that the Duke of Argyll, who professes to intervene on behalf of the preacher, does really, like another Balaam, bless me altogether in respect of the main issue.

I denied the justice of the preacher's ascription to men of science of the doctrine that miracles are incredible, because they are violations of natural law; and the Duke of Argyll says that he be lieves my denial to be well founded. The preacher was answering an objection which has now been generally abandoned." Either the preacher knew this or he did not know it. It seems to me, as a mere lay teacher, to be a pity that the great dome of St. Paul's" should have been made to "echo" (if so be that such stentorian effects were really produced) a statement which, admitting the first alternative, was unfair, and, admitting the second, was ignorant.*

Having thus sacrificed one half of the preacher's arguments, the Duke of Argyll proceeds to make equally short work with the other half. It appears that he fully accepts, my position that the occurrence of those events, which the preacher speaks of as catastrophes, is no evidence of disorder, inasmuch as such catastrophes may be necessary occasional consequences of uniform changes. Whence I conclude, his Grace agrees with me, that the talk about royal laws "wrecking" ordinary laws may be eloquent metaphor, but is also nonsense.

And now comes a further surprise. After having given these superfluous stabs to the slain body of the preacher's argument, my good ally remarks, with magnificent calmness: So far, then, the preacher and the professor are at Let them smoke the calu

one. met.

64

By all means: smoke would be the most appropriate symbol of this

*The Duke of Argyll speaks of the recent date of the demonstration of the fallacy of the doctrine in question. Recent" is a relative term, but I may mention that the question is fully discussed in my book on Hume;" which, if I may believe my publishers, has been read by a good many people since it appeared in 1879. Moreover, I observe, from a note at page 89 of The Reign of Law, a work to which I shall have occasion to advert by and by, that the Duke of Argyll draws attention to the circumstance that, so long ago as 1866, the views which I hold on this subject were well known. The Duke in fact, writing about this time, says, after quoting a phrase of mine: "The question of miracles seems now to be admitted on all hands to be simply a question of evidence.' In science we think that a teacher who ignores views which have been discussed coram populo for twenty years, is hardly up to the mark.

wonderful attempt to cover a retreat. After all, the Duke has come to bury the preacher, not to praise him; only he makes the funeral obsequies look as much like a triumphal procession as possible.

So far as the questions between the preacher and myself are concerned, then, I may feel happy. The authority of the Duke of Argyll is ranged on my side. But the Duke has raised a number of other questions, with respect to which I fear I shall have to dispense with his support-nay even be compelled to differ from him as much, or more, than I have done about his Grace's new rendering of the "benefit of clergy.'

In discussing catastrophes, the Duke indulges in statements, partly scientific, partly anecdotic, which appear to me to be somewhat misleading. We are told, to begin with, that Sir Charles Lyell's doctrine respecting the proper mode of interpreting the facts of geology (which is commonly called uniformitarianism) "does not hold its head quite so high as it once did." That is great news indeed. But is it true? All I can say is that I am aware of nothing that has happened of late that can in any way justify it; and my opinion is, that the body of Lyell's doctrine, as laid down in that great work, The Principles of Geology, whatever may have happened to its head, is a chief and permanent constituent of the foundations of geological science.

But this question cannot be advantageously discussed, unless we take some pains to discriminate between the essential part of the uniformitarian doctrine and its accessories; and it does not appear that the Duke of Argyll has carried his studies of geological philosophy so far as this point. For he defines uniformitarianism to be the assumption of the extreme slowness and perfect continuity of all geological changes.

What "perfect continuity" may mean in this definition, I am by no means sure; but I can only imagine that it signifies the absence of any break in the course of natural order during the millions of years, the lapse of which is recorded by geological phenomena.

Is the Duke of Argyll prepared to say

that any geologist of authority, at the present day, believes that there is the slightest evidence of the occurrence of supernatural intervention, during the long ages of which the monuments are preserved to us in the crust of the earth? And if he is not, in what sense has this part of the uniformitarian doctrine, as he defines it, lowered its pretensions to represent scientific truth?

As to the extreme slowness of all geological changes," it is simply a popular error to regard that as, in any wise, a fundamental and necessary dogma of uniformitarianism. It is extremely astonishing to me that any one who has carefully studied Lyell's great work can have so completely failed to appreciate its purport, which yet is "writ large' on the very title-page : "The Principles of Geology, being an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth's surface by reference to causes now in operation." The essence of Lyell's doctrine is here written so that those who run may read; and it has nothing to do with the quickness or slowness of the past changes of the earth's surface; except in so far as existing analogous changes may go on slowly, and therefore create a presumption in favor of the slowness of past changes.

With that epigrammatic force which characterizes his style, Buffon wrote, nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, in his famous Théorie de la Terre: Pour juger de ce qui est arrivé, et même de ce qui arrivera, nous n'avons qu'à examiner ce qui arrive.' The key of the past, as of the future, is to be sought in the present, and only when known causes of change have been shown to be insufficient have we any right to have recourse to unknown causes. Geology is as much an historical science as archaology; and I apprehend that all sound historical investigation rests upon this axiom. It underlay all Hutton's work and animated Lyell and Scrope in their successful efforts to revolutionize the geology of half a century ago.

There is no antagonism whatever, and there never was, between the belief in the views which had their chief and unwearied advocate in Lyell and the belief in the occurrence of catastrophes. The first edition of Lyell's Principles, published in 1830, lies before me; and a

large part of the first volume is occupied by an account of volcanic, seismic, and diluvial catastrophes which have occurred within the historical period. Moreover, the author over and over again expressly draws the attention of his readers to the consistency of catastrophes with his doctrine.

Notwithstanding, therefore, that we have not witnessed within the last three thousand years the devastation by deluge of a large continent, yet, as we may predict the future occurrence of such catastrophes, we are authorized to re

gard them as part of the present order of Nature, and they may be introduced into geological speculations respecting the past, provided that we do not imagine them to have been more frequent or general than we expect them to be in time to come (vol. i. p. 89). Again :

which we know to be at present the most inIf we regard each of the causes separately, strumental in remodelling the state of the sur

face, we shall find that we must expect each to be in action for thousands of years, without producing any extensive alterations in the habitable surface, and then to give rise, during a very brief period, to important revolutions (vol. ii. p. 161).*

Lyell quarrelled with the catastrophists, then, by no means because they assumed that catastrophes occur and have occurred, but because they had got into the habit of calling on their god Catastrophe to help them when they ought to have been putting their shoulders to the wheel of observation of the present course of nature, in order to help themselves out of their difficulties. And geological science has become what it is chiefly because geologists have gradually accepted Lyell's doctrine and followed his precepts.

So far as I know anything about the matter, there is nothing that can be called proof, that the causes of geological phenomena operated more intensely or more rapidly, at any time between the older tertiary and the oldest palæo