Unfortunately for the Professor, he has placed the arguments of his great teacher, the atheist Lucretius, in juxtaposition with those of the giant Bishop Butler. The reasonings of Lucretius, which he puts in the mouth of a supposed disciple, are the well-known arguments of the materialistic school viz. that a mental picture of "

living powers," "percipients or perceiving powers" of "ourselves," cannot be formed "apart from the organisms through which it is supposed to act"; that consciousness is not a necessary element of the true self, because the body may be deprived of consciousness during life by any accident affecting the brain; and, in that case, "Where is the man himself during the period of insensibility?" that brain disease will produce a thorough change of character, converting a moral man into a debauchee, thereby showing that the so-called immortal reason is nothing more than a healthy condition of the brain.

In reply, Dr. Tyndall gives what he imagines

profess to prove anything absolutely, and ver and over again insisted on the smallour knowledge, or rather on the depth gnorance, as regards the whole system universe." "I admit that you

ld crystalline forms out of the play of "I will go further,

ar force."

<nowledge that even a tree or flower in this way be organized."†

atoms are individually without sensation,

hore are they without intelligence. May

upon

this pro

ou, then, to try your hand Take your dead hydrogen atoms, your xygen atoms, your dead carbon atoms, ead phosphorus atoms, and all the other

dead as grains of shot, of which the

cannot believe that the bishop would ever have edged that inorganic matter could of itself make plant.

brain is formed. Imagine them separate and sensationless; observe them running together and forming all imaginable combinations. This is a pure mechanical process, is seeable by the mind. But, can you see or dream, or in any way imagine how, out of that mechanical act, and from these individually dead atoms, sensation, thought, or emotion are to arise? I can visualize the waves of ether as they cross the eye and hit the retina-and pursue to the central organ the motion thus imparted at the periphery, and see in idea the molecules of the brain thrown into tremors, but the notion baffles me that from these physical tremors things so utterly incongruous with them as sensation, thought, and emotion, can be derived."

"You

cannot satisfy the human understanding in its demand for logical continuity between molecular processes and the phenomena of consciousness." This fanciful sketch of what Dr. Tyndall believes to be Bishop Butler's opinions on the

following remarkable and inconsistent n: "I hold the bishop's views to be unble!" Far better would it have been for fessor's reputation if he had calmly I on the above arguments before he on the platform of the British AssociaBelfast, and if he had then confessed ef which he has put into the mouth of Butler, and which has been held by some profoundest thinkers-that it is incone that matter should think.

- enumerating all the writers whom he rs favourable to his theory, from the period downwards, he comes to what <s upon as the crowning - point of all phy and knowledge, Mr. Darwin's hypoof evolution, which he seems to regard as eatest discovery ever made by man, forthat it is not an immutable law, but

only an unverified theory. It is amusing to find him speaking of it as coming slowly to birth, like the law of gravitation which Newton pondered over for twenty years. In like manner, he says, Darwin reflected on his idea for twenty-two years. He admits that Lamarck had previously shadowed it forth, and that his views on "the development of species out of changes of habit and external condition" were fully set before the public by the author of "Vestiges of Creation." I can remember when that book appeared, and the furor it occasioned, an excitement equal to that caused by Darwin's "Descent of Man." But it was a nine days' wonder, and would have sunk into utter oblivion had it not been revived by the publication of Darwin's work. The sharpest criticism on the "Vestiges of Creation" was one I heard shortly after the time of its appearance. A well-known geologist, speaking of the book to a distinguished astronomer, said, "That's a very clever book, but the author knows very little about geology."