esty, characterized his deportment; morality, integrity, and in flexible devotion to the interests of mankind formed his unbend ing and most sterling character. He aided the feeble, cheered on and welcomed to his home struggling genius, and gave them of his means, always slender as they were; and in his character of a public man, he cut down extravagance, lopped off the excrescences of the treasury and the state, and demanded that the guilty should not go unpunished. He led economical reform in the administration of the government to the diminution of his own salary; and left a character as irreproachable and pure as that of Lord Chatham. His urbanity of demeanor in domestic life contrasted with the recklessness of Fox and the negative virtues of Wm. Pitt. Thus we find Edmund Burke possessing all those essential qualities of noble worth and boundless knowledge which Cicero declared to be necessary to the perfect orator; thus we find him taking a great part in the world, and enlightening mankind with his copious eloquence and his unapproachable writings, which are destined to live with civilization and spread with the language in which he wrote. Without praise, we may say that he is our modern Cicero in the influence he has exerted and will exert in the great republic of letters; he only wanting that universal language in which Cicero spoke, to give himself perennial reign. ART. VII.—1. Opuscules Physiques et Chimiques. Par M. LAVOISIER, de l'Académie Royale de Sciences. Paris: 1744. 2 Rapport Annual sur les Progres des Sciences Physiques et Chimiques. Par M. BARZELIUS. Paris. 1841. 3. A History of Chemical Theory, from the age of Lavoisier to the present time. By AD. WURTZ, Membre de l'Institut. Translated by HENRY WATTS, B.A., F.R.S. London. 1869. 4. First Principles of Chemical Philosophy. By JOSIAH P. COOKE. Cambridge. 1868. THIS is not alone the age of discovery. It is the age of change-of revolution. Nothing is fixed. All things are mutable, unsteady. The earth itself, once accepted as the fixed centre of the universe, is now known to be an endless wanderer, blown like a leaf by the winds. of destiny throughout space. It has its diurnal, its annual, its epocal revolutions, its orbital changes, its polar shiftings, its daily tides in the ocean, matched by millenial tides in the solid rocks. If our globe has proved thus unstable, we cannot look for any special fixity in the evolutions of nature upon its surface, or rather in our conceptions of these evolutions. In fact, our successive discoveries of the mutations of the earth are significant of the whole progress of physical and mental science. Everywhere the old landmarks are giving way before the waves of the ocean of discovery, shifting, sinking in the quicksands of time. New ideas and theories rise upon the ruins of the old. Life is found intruding upon the empire of death. Endless activity stirs at the heart of the most rigid substances. Solidity itself is an exploded term. The densest material is a congeries of pores and vibrating atoms. All the forces of matter are simply motions affecting its particles. But speculation has not been content to rest here. The axe has been applied to the very root of the tree of the visible universe. The existence of matter itself has been denied. The utmost that will be granted is the existence of immaterial centres of force. Nothing but force and motion-such is Professor Faraday's ultimatum. We might go yet deeper, descending into the cloudland of metaphysics. Here we find not only matter, but mind, reeling and passing away before our eyes. The strictest realist will tell us that things are not as we see them, that most of the so-called attributes of matter arise from the action of etherial vibrations upon our nerves. The mild idealist declares that we are only aware of mental impressions, and denies that there is any exterior universe, unless it be one of ideas. Others slaughter even mental existence, and declare that nothing can be proved to really exist beyond the limits of a single mind, and this mind but a congeries of thoughts; space, time, matter, motion, force: all these forming but a strange compound of inter-related ideas. But, avoiding all ground so lost in mist and vapor, all arguments from such shadowy premises, there has been sufficient mutation within the circle of the positive sciences to engage our earnest attention. In this epoch of mental activity the theories and hypotheses of old reasoners have proved as unstable as the beliefs on which they were founded. All civilized nations in our days abound in philosophers, who, with the steady persistence of ants, are removing grain by grain the foundations of old systems, and laying new and more firmly-built foundations further down the path of time. [The above introductory remarks are a pretty fair specimen of the manner in which the good people of the present day prove their own vast superiority to their ancestors, not only of remote ages but of all past ages. We do not regard self-conceit and vanity as things which ought to be fostered; nor do we wish to create any other " sensation than such as may be created by sober facts and truth. We are therefore opposed to views of this kind. The truth is that things are no more "mutable," or "unsteady," now than they were thousands of years ago. No such discovery has been made in our time, or at any other time, as that the earth is an "endless wanderer," etc., since a body performing its revolutions in accordance with immutable laws cannot be regarded as a wanderer; still less can it be regarded as "blown like a leaf by the winds of destiny," or any other winds. In short, we may as well admit at the outset, that we suspect our present contributor has obtained his scientific maxims from the "Faculty of the Department of Science" of the University of Pennsylvania, and we think hat most of our scientific readers will take a similar view of his case when informed that it was the same writer who made the astounding announcement in an article in our last number, entitled "The Sun and its Phenomena," that "a pound weight at its (the sun's) surface would weigh 141 tons while a man would weigh about 20,000 tons."* * Justice requires, however, that we present his explanation to our readers Replying to a letter in which we express suprise and regret that he shoul have made so absurd a statement, he proceeds: "In reard to the error you point out in my article on the Sun, I acknowledge To many readers the question would naturally suggest itself here, Why publish articles containing such statements? This seems just and logical; but we do not forget that some of the most eminent scientific men, and even discoverers, have committed the most egregious and ludicrous blunders in their most valuable dissertations. We also bear testimony, most cheerfully, to the fact that the perpetrator of the blunders to which we now more particularly allude is a writer of considerable ability, and one by no means averse to research and investigation. Nay more, his article on the Sun is a well written paper-notwithstanding one or two rather ludicrous errors which it contains. And the same will be found true of the article the introduction to which has elicited these remarks. The editor of a periodical has much more winnowing to do than is generally supposed. While he has many other labors to perform, each sufficiently exacting, he cannot expect to be always successful in excluding all the chaff from the wheat. The best he can do, when he fails, is to repeat the winnowing process; and if he find that wheat grown in particular regions has such an excess of chaff in it as to render it impossible for him to prepare it fully for the mill, his only remedy is not to purchase any more of that particular brand until it has been fully winnowed by some one who has more time to perform the operation than he himself can afford to devote to it. To this we need hardly add that our rather enthusiastic friend is great carelessness, and am sorry to have made a wrong statement in the pages of the Review, through haste in writing. My carelessness consists, not in having made an absolutely incorrect statement, but in omitting the necessary qualifying clause, and also in writing 14% where I should have written 140%. "I intended to say that if the sun was condensed to the volume of the earh, with its present mass, a pound at its surface would weigh 140% tons, and a nan 20,000 tons. This statement would have been correct, but it is very incorect as I have written it. I have no excuse to offer for my carelessness except that I will try to be more careful in future." We think it will be generally admitted that any one who will no' write on a scientific subject otherwise than with "great carelessness" should abstain from such writing altogether. If "haste in writing" is notanother name for "great carelessness," it is at least as lame an excuse, and does as little credit to one who undertakes to instruct an enlightened puhic in the mysteries of astronomical phenomena.-Ed. not the astronomer of the National Quarterly, his paper on the Sun being his first, and probably his last contribution to us on that science. Nor is he our chemist; although he gives a very excellent sketch of the progress of that science in the article for which the above remarks of his are intended as an introduction. His forte, however, is neither astronomy nor chemistry, nor, perhaps, any of the exact sciences; but that there are few better or more accurate ethnologists or more conscientious investigators of ancient history we can bear emphatic testimony. But we have another observation or two to make on the introduction before we present to our readers the body of the article. The first is, that there is not one of the various theories which it claims to be the original work of the present generation that had not been fully and profoundly discussed by the Greek philosophers of the times of Pythagoras, Socrates and Epicurus. This is true, for example, of the atomic theory, of the theory which denies the existence of matter, of the theory of etherial vibrations, of the theory that nothing exists beyond the limits of a single mind, etc. Nay, most of them had been discussed by the Hindoos before the Greeks, and may be easily traced in some of the most ancient of the Hindoo epics that have come down to our time. Take, for instance, the Mahâ Bharatâ, justly called the Great. Only its episodes need be examined in order to find several of those theories, and as noble, sublime thoughts as ever modern philosopher, scientist or poet has given expression to. May not this be said, without exaggeration, of the passage in the episode of the Five Precious Stones, in which Krishna reproaches the hero for his lack of resentment, energy and resolution, as follows: "Ne'er was the time when I was not, nor thee, nor yonder kings of earth, Hereafter, ne'er shall be the time when one of us shall cease to be. The soul within its mortal frame glides on through childhood, youth and age, Then, in another form renewed, renews its stated course again. And who is he that shall destroy the work of the Indestructible ?"* Account of the Writings, Religion and Manners of the Hindoos, including translations of their principal works. In 4 vols., 4to. Vol. i., p. 87. |