ON THE LEGAL DEGREES OF MARRIAGE IN CANADA.

HE talented editor of the Canadian

THEdus Times, I observe, in his issues

for September, October and November, has written a series of most interesting articles on the actual condition of the law of Canada, on the subject of marriage with a deceased wife's sister. Such marriages came under the head of the 'Prohibited Degrees,' first enforced by a statute of King Henry VIII., whom Mr. Armour most justly terms that noted expert in matrimonial matters.' It appears from the exhaustive statement of the facts of the case given in the Law Times, that the duty of enforcing the invalidity of marriages within the prohibited degrees in England fell into the hands of the Ecclesiastical Courts ; that the Common Law of England viewed marriage from a wholly different standpoint to that of the Ecclesiastical Courts, and that the English Civil Courts which administered the Common Law took no cognizance whatever of objections to a marriage within the 'Prohibited Degrees.' In England the Ecclesiastical Courts have a special jurisdiction based on the fact that England has a State Religion and an Established Church. But in Canada, which recognises neither the one nor the other, the Ecclesiastical Courts and their 'Prohibited Degrees' can have no status whatever. All marriages are legal in Canada when the parties are legally competent to marry, i. e. when neither is incapacitated by being married already, by idiocy, or by being under the age fixed by law. And if it be asked what security exists in Canada against the existence of marriages such as all civilized nations have regarded as incestuous, such as that of a brother with that of a sister, the answer is that such security is given in the certainty that ministers of all denominations would refuse to sanction such marriages, and in the certainty, equally strong, of the disapproval of public opinion.

This question is an important one, not only as concerning the status of the children of such marriages with a deceased wife's sister, but as relating to an attempt on the part of the advocates of reactionary ecclesiasticism to foist into the legislation of a country, where all sects and churches are equal before the law, a shred and survival of church authority which, so far as this country is concerned, is, and ought to be, as dead as the Star Chamber.

It is remarkable that in the last debate on the subject in the English House of Lords, the bishops, who, true to the reactionary traditions which afford the only raison d'être for an ecclesiastical peerage, opposed the removal of marriage disabilities, abandoned altogether the argument from Leviticus. This is remarkable because a certain amount of appeal to the dead weight of ignorant prejudice is still made by those who ground their opposition to legalizing marriage with a deceased wife's sister on its being forbidden in the old Testament. On the same authority they might just as reasonably enforce circumcision, or make penal enactments against splitting wood on the Saturday Sabbath.

As to argument derived from social expediency, the abolition of aunts' and the like, such arguments, if any exist which can be shown to be valid, may be very good grounds for parents, friends, or ministers, dissuading by every moral means at their command parties intending to contract such marriages. But it must be remembered that there is a large class of marriages which is morally, socially, or even physically objectionable, but which it is no business of the state to prevent. It might indeed be conceivable in some greatly altered phase of society when the socialist idea of paternal supervision on the part of the State was carried into effect, that the law of marriage might undergo important modifications, and that such impediments as under the law of heredity would tend to deteriorate the race, would be

'THE

is meant to carry out what Mr. Parkin, in an article in the present number, shown to us by the editor, so justly desiderates, the free communication of what thought may occur to us in our studies. As Mr. Parkin has drawn attention to the position of Diderot in literary history, it may be worth while to remind readers of a few facts in the biography of that remarkable man, a new edition of whose works is now attracting attention, just a century after his death, and concerning whom the interesting article to which Mr. Parkin has referred, appeared in the Nineteenth Century.

Diderot was a Parisian Oliver Goldsmith. He had somewhat the same misadventures in early life, received, like Goldsmith, a good education, like him, vexed and disappointed his friends by turning away again and again from respectability and respectable callings, and finally, and for the rest of his days as a literary Bohemian, being so much worse off than Goldsmith, inasmuch as the Parisian Grub Street was under the ban of the Church, and of the Police as well as of Society. The tone of society at this time was deplorably lax, and Diderot was no better than his neighbours; but one fails to see why Mr. Parkin should make that an argument against his philosophical opinions, as he does when he talks of the impotence of lofty intellect to lift a man above the influence of the vilest passions?' Why, Mr. Parkin, what do you make of the vilest passions' of the Cardinal de Rohan or the Abbé Perigard? Do they disprove or discredit Christianity? Is it not notorious that the French Church in Paris was at that time steeped in the worst profligacy Argue against Materialism if you will, but do not argue against it

on account of Diderot's amours, for that argument cuts both ways, and the average Christian of Diderot's time was, we fear, not much better than he.

And it may be truly said that the evil that Diderot did was interred with his bones, while the good lives after him, in the social and political fruits of his Encyclopædia. In this, the great engine for overturning the Feudal oppression of France, there is no irreligion, no atheism, only passionate pleading for equal rights of man with man; for the poor, for the oppressed; for the doctrine then so abhorrent to men in power, now so generally accepted that it seems trite; the doctrine that the common people ought to have a voice in government, and be the main object of governmental care. At this great work Diderot laboured incessantly, over many years, suffering constant persecution. But the Encyclopædia spread its influence far and wide. All classes read it. It took the place of a modern liberal newspaper of the highest class in a day when, in our sense of the word, there was no newspaper. Joined with other kindred forces, it made possible the Great Revolution whose thunders shook so many strongholds of evil, when lightnings cleared the air of so much that was noxious. This debt of gratitude modern society owes to Diderot.

Like Goldsmith, Diderot had a ready, facile and clear style. He is rather a brilliant and forcible writer of political pamphlets and leading articles, than a deep-thinking philosopher. As Rosenkrantz, the Hegelian, said of him: 'Diderot is a philosopher in whom all the contradictions of the time struggle with one another.' His mind is the echo of a chaos. His opinions did indeed incline to the crude and rough-shod Materialism of D'Holbach, but of argument or logical system he built up nothing, and contributed to the literature of Materialism only a few pages of declamatory eloquence.

Mr. Parkin imagines that he is seriously reasoning with Materialists when he asks What is the Great Producer? Is it not the mind?' As if any so-called Materialist from Epicurus on would deny the superiority of the phenomenon which we call mental. Let us reason against Materialism, by all means, but let us not suppose that Materialists are so childish as to consider mental results to be of less value than those which are more obviously what we call material.

The true author of French eighteenth century Materialism was not Diderot but his friend D'Holbach, who taught a very ill-digested and rough-and-ready form of the doctrine in his 'Système de la Nature.' He took, no doubt, his idea of their being nothing in the universe but matter in spontaneous motion from Lucretius, and there does seem to be a resemblance between that theory and the modern scientific truth of molecular motion. But there is this difference. The ancient Epicurean attributed the motion to a desire, a volition, a spontaneous agency in the atom, just as the

ancients attributed the motion of a star to a spirit residing there and urging it on. Modern Science knows nothing of volition or desire in molecular motion.

In D'Holbach and Diderot's sense, as in that of Lucretius and Epicurus, there are now no Materialists. Those to whom that name is applied by men who do not take the trouble to examine their writings acknowledge, in the phenomena called mental, as also in the phenomena called material, the same inscrutable mystery. It is with the phenomena only that Science deals.

C. P. M.

Volcanoes: What they are and what they teach. BY JOHN W. JUDD, F.R.S., Professor of Geology in the Royal School of Mines. (International Scientific Series.) New York: D. Appleton & Co.; Toronto: N. Ure & Co.

In this instructive volume of the International Scientific Series, we have presented what may be called the theory and the practice of Volcanoes.' According to the revised definition a volcano is not a burning mountain, from the summit of which issue smoke and flame.' A volcano is in strictness not an elevation at all but essentially the very reverse, a hole in the ground; even the lofty cones of Etna and Teneriffe are but the accumulated ash-heaps of Platonic furnaces. There is little or no burning or combustion strictly so-called; the vent occurs no oftener at the summit than on the sides or at the base of the cone the supposed sunoke is really condensing steam; the raging flames are nothing more than the glow of the interior molten mass on the vaporous cloud above. In fact the volcano is a mighty steam-engine of the high pressure kind. Some of these engines, like

Stromboli, have without a moment's rest for repairs worked continuously for at least 2,000 years, and it may be for many times two thousand. More usually the action is spasmodic, and while the fit is on, the convulsive energy is almost inconceivable. The eruptions of Vesuvius impress us with awe; but they are inconsiderable when compared with many others. A hundred years ago, Java witnessed a volcanic mitrailleuse which, in a single night, discharged literally a whole mountain of ammunition, amount ing by measurement to thirty billion cubic feet, and buried out of sight no less than forty villages. The motive force is evidently steam of extreme tension, and earthquakes are simply vibrations occasioned by some violent change of pressure. The lightning that adds so much to the awful grandeur of a volcanic eruption is generated by the friction of the steam vapour against the sides of the vent; while the rain floods, that so often follow great eruptions, are fed by the same vapour condensed. When a severe and sudden fall occurs in barometric pressure, we almost infallibly hear of disastrous explosions in coal mines; for the reduction of atmospheric pressure

has disturbed the balance of forces and let loose imprisoned vapours. At such times also Euceladus the Titan, on whom Sicily was flung by Minerva, becomes aweary of his load, and Vulcan kindles his forge-fires in Ætna.

Volcanic energy like every other force becomes finally exhausted, and in its decadence it often passes through the stage of geyser or mud volcano, and at last reaches senility in a bubbling overflow of tepid water. These thermal springs are gentler manifestations of volcanic energy, but the total loss of heat from such leakages far exceeds the heat thrown off by the 350 ever-active volcanoes and the still larger number of intermittent.

The source of all this internal heat is here discussed in a philosophical and judicial manner. On a balance of the evidence now accumulated we should lean to the early suggestion of Sir Humphrey Davy, that the heat is produced by the chemical action of water when admitted to the uncombined metals and their proto-salts which certainly exist in vast stores a few miles beneath our feet.

The illustrations of the volume are bright and appropriate. By means of instantaneous photography (for the first time employed in 1872), Vesuvius is being now portrayed whenever his features are convulsed. By measurement of these instantanoeus photographs it can easily be shown that some of the missiles caught by the camera in their flight were flung four miles high by this steam artillery of the inferno.

that education signifies the erection and number of showy and expensive buildings, the amount of money expended, the organization of boards of school trustees, the training of swarms of youthful teachers, the appointment of Inspectors, the awarding of contracts and supplies, and every other conceivable device wherein money is the chief ingredient, and the handling of that money the chief employment.'

We

But Mr. Dallas has allowed himself to become so saturated with the teachings of his favourite Plato as to be often unintelligible to the inany. He has a way, too, of using words in a sense peculiar to himself, as, for instance, the important word esthetic,' which he defines, p. 81, 'the unfixed, because its sensuous faculty does not measure.' This word, as generally understood, is used only in the senses, first, that in which it is employed by Ruskin, and in ordinary popular use, to signify the artistic faculty; and, secondly, in the sense in which Kant employs it in the first part of the Kritik,' as equivalent to our faculty of receiving ideas in general. Now we hold that a new writer has no legitimate right thus to change the accepted meaning of words. have also to complain of Mr. Dallas as an innovator in spelling-he spells intellect, intelect'-possibly he is ambitious of becoming an Inspector of Schools in the good City of Toronto, for to no other class of mortal man is it permitted to take these liberties with the Queen's English! Also, he has not the fear of Collector Patton before his eyes sufficiently to keep him from stating such heretical doctrine as that of 'the soul of the world,' the very point on which the Philosopher Giordano Bruno was condemned, and by some of Collector Patton's predecessors, publicly burned at Rome in the year 1660. But we are bound to say that Mr. Dallas has always the courage of his opinions, and is an original and intrepid thinker.

Boyhood Hours. By Archibald M'Alpine Taylor. Toronto: Hunter, Rose & Co, 1881.

In this little volume we welcome another indication of that increased love of poetical literature which, as Mr. Bourinot has so truly pointed out, as we mentioned last month, has been so marked of late years in Canada. Mr. Taylor's verses are somewhat unequal, but display abundant marks of