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There is no dearth of readers in Norway; for education is widely spread. Every sea-side town has its resident schoolmaster, and each mountain farm is visited by some itinerant teacher; so that a young person unable to read and write at least, is rarely met with. Then the long labors of that zealous revivalist, Hange, sometimes called the John Wesley of Norway, have not been without result in an awakening to religious inquiry and hope; although that result is not so positive and marked might have been, had circumstances favored the suitable embodiment and expression of a reviving spirituality.

In a country of few villages, but of many scattered homesteads; where the

churches stand in lonely symbolism, apart from the people's working-day life-often not to be reached for several weeks together, on account of distance and weather-often shut up for successive Sundays; (as where one pastor serves four churches, divided by distances of thirty or forty miles from each other;) and where throughout large districts no dissenting chapel offers a resource to worshipers who would fain go to church, but can not, nor serves as a focus for the collection and radiation of Gospel light in any of the Church's dark days; how doubly urgent is the need of a Bible for every man, and how ceaseless should be the efforts of a Protestant clergy to secure this boon to a prepared and reading people!

From the British Quarterly.

OMPHALOS: AN ATTEMPT TO UNTIE THE GEOLOGICAL KNOT.*

MORE than once we have had occasion | to write of Mr. Gosse as an eminent naturalist. Here we must view him in a somewhat different capacity. He now comes forward as a fanciful theorist, bearing in his hand a book which, had it been published anonymously, we should almost have been inclined to regard as an elaborate jeu d'esprit. Not having any right, however, to assume that a gentleman like Mr. Gosse would commit a post octavo joke, or indulge in a solemn piece of waggery involging 376 pages of letter-press, we are compelled to conclude that he is in good earnest in his attempt to solve the problem of the pre-Adamite world. What that problem is we need scarcely state. Scripture tells us, apparently, that the earth was created with all its physical furniture in the short space of six days. The geologist tells us, on the testimony of the great stone-book, that this planet must have served an apprenticeship of millions of years before it was fully pre

pared for the reception of man. How are we to deal with these two assertions? Mr. Gosse is of opinion that the reputed antiquity of the globe is a mere figment, and that therefore the Mosaic week was the literal limit of the Creator's exertions. But admitting, as he does, all the evidences of physical age which the rocks present, he phantomizes them, if we may so speak, by a process of reasoning which would have gladdened the heart of a Berkeley. The theory is not wholly new. It has been promulgated in other productions as well. Mr. Gosse, however, has endeavored to invest it with an air of dignity by drawing up an array of facts which would appear very formidable if they only possessed the merit of reaching and overlapping the question in dispute.

The idea is this. In creating an animal it was necessary to commence at some given point. Take a modern cow and trace her history. A couple of years she was a heifer-prior to that she figured as * Omphalos: an Attempt to Untie the Geological a mere fœtus; that foetus, reckoning rea helpless calf. Before her birth she was By PHILIP HENRY GOSSE, F.R.S. With 56 Illustrations on Wood. London: Van Voorst, trogressively, had formerly been an embryo, an embryonic cell, a germinal dot;

Knot.

1857. Pp. 376.

and then, first of all, an ovum. But that ovum, origin as it may seem of her individuality, belonged to, and was once part of a precedent cow. Tracking the latter through similar phases of existence, the process must be continued until we reach the founder of the vaccine line-the Eve of Cows-and find a resting place in the fact of creation. But what is creation? A beginning? Yes-in chronology, but not in physiology; for Mr. Gosse defines it as the "sudden bursting into a circle." Perhaps we shall facilitate the reader's conceptions if we suppose that a watch could be made at a stroke by a human artisan. In that case the hands must point to some particular hour and moment of the day-say twenty minutes past twelve. A spectator seeing the fingers in motion, and hearing the apparatus tick-tack, after the fashion of a regularly constructed time-piece, would conclude that those fingers had run through many previous hours at least. It would be a great mistake, however. The watch had no existence at nineteen minutes past twelve.

This consequence, therefore, followsthat every created thing, when first produced, must have been produced with certain physical attributes of antiquity, from which an observer, ignorant of the circumstances, would naturally assume that it had existed for a considerable period before. Thus, Adam must have exhibited precisely the same evidences of age in his person as if he had been alive for the exact number of years he appeared to represent. He must had a navelhence the title of the book-though no umbilical cord was really required in the case of one who never issued from woman's womb. So an exogenous tree, if created this moment, must needs present a series of rings expressive of many years of previous vitality. So, again, as Chateaubriand asserts-and we commend the illustration to Mr. Gosse's attentioneven the first oaks at the moment of their creation would be adorned with old ravens, nests, and young, unfledged doves. And if this were the case, why should not the earth be subject to the same necessity? Why should not all its various strata all its fossil relics, all its petrified proofs of antiquity-be the mere accompaniments of the creative act-things inserted where they now appear, simply because, without them, the planet could not be just what it now happens to be?

Such seem to be Mr. Gosse's views. Perhaps the first question a reader will ask will be this-why might not the globe have been called into being without these lying geological appurtenances? We can imagine it to exist without the red sandstone fishes as well as with them. We can not see the smallest reason why the iguanodon and the megalosaurus should have laid their bones where they are now found, if their appearance is purely delusive. Indeed, before we can entertain Mr. Gosse's proposito for a moment, we must put down all man reason-his own as well-and adopt a supposition which is just as monstrous as if some learned antiquary were to argue that Pompeii and Herculaneum were perfect hoaxes-mere mineral freaks-since, instead of having flourished for years, these towns were produced at a stroke, and constituted necessary ingredients in the soil! Mr. Gosse does indeed go so far as to make the astounding assertion, that if the Almighty had seen fit to postpone the creation of the world until the present century, he would have brought it forth with all its towns, railways, shipping, and inhabitants, just as it stands! Shall we err in saying that such desperate suppositions are worthier of the Academy of Lagado than of the British scientific press?

It will be seen, in fact, that Mr. Gosse assumes the chief points on which he wishes to rest his argument. It is enough, for example, to ask him how he knows that Adam had a navel, and you put his whole volume hors de combat at a blow. His reply must really resolve itself into this: "I, Philip Henry Gosse, am of opinion that such was the case." The author of Tenby must excuse us if we decline to take a mere surmise as the basis of a book. Plainly there was no call for such a physiological feature in the first man of our race. Why, therefore, should he possess what was perfectly useless? It does not help the matter to assert that creation is "bursting into a circle." This is another assumption, in so far as it requires that life must be commenced with the precise paraphernalia of being which would be appropriate to a creature traveling to the same stage of existence by the ordinary modes of progression. What this irruption into a circle can mean with regard to a planet, we can hardly comprehend; but granting that the view

possessed any scientific solidity, it must, of course, involve a continued advance of the globe through certain states, with periodical returns to the same points. The ship-carpenter mentioned in one of Captain Marryat's novels, was not, therefore, such a bad philosopher when he laid down the theory that, after a given cycle every thing would be restored to its present condition, and that he would be seen sawing the same plank and driving the same nails, just as Mr. Gosse will probably be writing the same work, and we expressing our surprise that it should have been gravely produced. Circles, like whirlpools, are most inconvenient things to enter, and we really should like to know how Mr. Gosse would do justice to his own invention. Will he gallantly assert that this planet, after running through certain stages of growth and decay, must return in its own person, or in the person of its young earths, to its molten or granitic condition, and then pass through all the fossil phases exhibited in its sedimentary rocks? The very phantomizing of such tremendous geologi cal periods implies that they must be made good either on the existing globe or on some of its posterity.

It is impossible, however, to deal argumentatively with a theory which starts with a miracle, and draws upon that miracle for an answer to all your objections. The only course in such a case is to put the theorist in direct hostility to himself. The sole ground, then, upon which Mr. Gosse's views can be admitted is the assumption that the Almighty could, if he thought proper, and in the exercise of His Omnipotence, make the world in an instant, with all its fallacious fossil equipment, as it now appears. Let the idea be granted for the time. We say nothing as to the contradictions which such a concession involves; nor do we ask whether we may have any warrant for supposing that the Almighty would do this simply because he could do it. But what will be the reader's surprise to learn that after resorting to a miracle, Mr. Gosse proceeds to lay that miracle under certain physical restrictions, that after appealing to omnipotent resources, he proceeds to cripple those resources; and that whilst availing himself of boundless creative power as the first condition of his theory, and for the purpose of mastering all difficulties, the second condition is, that the Almighty was placed under a

stern necessity, which would not permit him to make the world in any other way than the one Mr. Gosse has suggested:

"We have passed in review before us the whole organic world; and the result is uniform, that no example can be selected from the vast vegetable kingdom, nor from the vast animal kingdom, which did not, at the instant of its creation, present indubitable evidence of a previous history. This is not put forth as a hypothesis, but as a necessity. I do not say it was probably so, but that it was certainly so; not that it may have been thus, but that it could not be otherwise.”

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Surely the same supernatural power which could in an instant arrange a mass of rocks in regular layers, and endow them with a myriad evidences of age, could have made the first man without a navel, or the oolite formation without a bed of Kimmeridge clay? Imagine that whilst standing before a fine mansion, Mr. Gosse were to say: Sir, you doubtless suppose that this house took many weeks to erect? Nothing of the kind; it was reared in an instant. It is the work of one of the genii. The layers of stone and mortar appear to have been laid in the regular way, but, in truth, the uppermost stratum was contemporaneous with the lowest. The roof was in its place as soon as the floor, and the chimneys are of the same date to a second as the cellars. It was ready for occupation at once, fires burning, tables and chairs all arranged, the cloth spread for dinner, and the dinner-bell in the act of ringing, as if the tenant had already arrived." "Truly, then," we exclaim, "the Genius was a being of miraculous powers ?" "Why, not exactly," replies Mr. Gosse; "he could make the house in a moment, but he could not make it in a month." "Could not, Mr. Gosse ?" we rejoin; "you mean, would not ?" "No," says that gentleman, “I mean just what I say. He was under some nameless compulsion. It was impossible for him to spread course after course, like a human mason, or to wait till his walls were raised before he put on his rafters. This was his only way of doing business. It is not a mere fashion the Genii have, but an absolute necessity with them."

We have too frequently had occasion to admire the pious and reverent spirit in which Mr. Gosse's productions are written to suppose, for an instant, that he advo

cates any disrespectful qualifications of the | Few fancies, indeed, have been better Divine power. We assume him to speak adorned in this respect; but to make it of its exercise under what the author will truly valuable, we are afraid that Mr. deem purely philosophical exigencies. Gosse must omit his theory in a future Let us simply add, that the work contains edition, and leave out his Hamlet without a large amount of interesting matter. compunction.

From Fraser's Magazine.

THE INFLUENCE OF WOMEN ON THE PROGRESS OF KNOWLEDGE.*

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THE subject upon which I have undertaken to address you is the influence of women on the progress of knowledge, undoubtedly one of the most interesting questions that could be submitted to any audience. Indeed, it is not only very interesting, it is also extremely important. When we see how knowledge has civilized mankind; when we see how every great step in the march and advance of nations has been invariably preceded by a corresponding step in their knowledge; when we moreover see, what is assuredly true, that women are constantly growing more influential, it becomes a matter of great moment that we should endeavor to ascertain the relation between their influence and our knowledge. On every side, in all social phenomena, in the education of children, in the tone and spirit of literature, in the forms and usages of life; nay, even in the proceedings of legislatures, in the history of statute-books, and in the decisions of magistrates, we find manifold proofs that women are gradually making their way, and slowly but surely winning for themselves a position superior to any they have hitherto attained. This is one of many peculiarities which distinguish modern civilization, and which show how essentially the most advanced countries are different from those that formerly flourished. Among the most celebrated nations of antiquity, women held a very subordinate place. The most splendid and durable monument of the Roman empire, and the noblest gift Rome has bequeathed to posterity, is her jurispru

* A Discourse delivered at the Royal Institution, on Friday, the 19th of March, 1858.

dence-a vast and harmonious system, worked out with consummate skill, and from which we derive our purest and largest notions of civil law. Yet this, which, not to mention the immense sway it still exercises in France and Germany, has taught to our most enlightened lawyers, their best lessons; and which enabled Bracton among the earlier jurists, Somers, Hardwicke, Mansfield, and Stowell among the later, to soften by its refinement the rude maxims of our Saxon ancestors, and adjust the coarser principles of the old Common Law to the actual exigencies of life; this imperishable specimen of human sagacity is, strange to say, so grossly unjust towards women, that a great writer upon that code has well observed, that in it women are regarded not as persons, but as things; so completely were they stripped of all their rights, and held in subjection by their proud and imperious masters. As to the other great nation of antiquity, we have only to open the literature of the ancient Greeks to see with what airs of superiority, with what serene and lofty contempt, and sometimes with what mocking and biting scorn, women were treated by that lively and ingenious people. Instead of valuing them as companions, they looked on them as toys. How little part women really took in the development of Greek civilization may be illustrated by the singular fact, that their influence, scanty as it was, did not reach its height in the most civilized times, or in the most civilized regions. In modern Europe, the influence of women and the spread of civilization have been nearly commensurate, both advancing with almost equal speed. But if you

compare the picture of Greek life in Ho-vorable her circumstances may have been, mer with that to be found in Plato and has made a discovery sufficiently importhis cotemporaries, you will be struck by a ant to mark an epoch in the annals of the totally opposite circumstance. Between human mind. These are facts which can Plato and Homer there intervened, ac- not be contested, and from them a very cording to the common reckoning, a pe- stringent and peremptory inference has riod of at least four centuries, during been drawn. From them it has been inwhich the Greeks made many notable ferred, and it is openly stated by eminent improvements in the arts of life, and in writers, that women have no concern with various branches of speculative and prac- the highest forms of knowledge; that such tical knowledge. So far, however, from matters are altogether out of their reach; women participating in this movement, that they should confine themselves to we find that, in the state of society exhi- practical, moral, and domestic life, which bited by Plato and his cotemporaries, it is their province to exalt and to beautithey had evidently lost ground; their in- fy; but that they can exercise no influfluence being less than it was in the earlier ence, direct or indirect, over the progress and more barbarous period depicted by of knowledge, and that if they seek to Homer. This fact illustrates the question exercise such influence, they will not only in regard to time; another fact illustrates fail in their object, but will restrict the it in regard to place. In Sparta, women field of their really useful and legitimate possessed more influence than they did in activity. Athens; although the Spartans were rude and ignorant, the Athenians polite and accomplished. The causes of these inconsistencies would form a curious object for investigation; but it is enough to call your attention to them as one of many proofs that the boasted civilizations of antiquity were eminently one-sided, and that they fell because society did not advance in all its parts, but sacrificed some of its constituents in order to secure the progress

of others.

In modern European society we have happily no instance of this sort; and if we now inquire what the influence of women has been upon that society, every one will allow that on the whole it has been extremely beneficial. Their influence has prevented life from being too exclusively practical and selfish, and has saved it from degenerating into a dull and monotonous routine, by infusing into it an ideal and romantic element. It has softened the violence of men; it has improved their manners; it has lessened their cruelty. Thus far, the gain is complete and undeniable. But if we ask what their influence has been, not on the general interests of society, but on one of those interests, namely, the progress of knowledge, the answer is not so obvious. For, to state the matter candidly, it must be confessed that none of the greatest works which instruct and delight mankind, have been composed by women. In poetry, in painting, iff sculpture, in music, the most exquisite productions are the work of men. No woman, however fa

Now, I may as well state at once, and at the outset, that I have come here tonight with the intention of combating this proposition, which I hold to be unphilosophical and dangerous; false in theory and pernicious in practice. I believe, and I hope before we separate to convince you, that so far from women exercising little or no influence over the progress of knowledge, they are capable of exercising and have actually exercised an enor mous influence; that this influence, is, in fact, so great that it is hardly possible to assign limits to it; and that great as it is, it may with advantage be still further increased. I hope, moreover, to convince you that this influence has been exhibited not merely from time to time in rare, sudden, and transitory ebullitions, but that it acts by virtue of certain laws inherent to human nature; and that although it works as an under-current below the surface, and is therefore invisible to hasty observers, it has already produced the most important results, and has affected the shape, the character, and the amount of our knowledge.

To clear up this matter, we must first of all understand what knowledge is. Some men who pride themselves on their common-sense

and whenever a man boasts much about that, you may be pretty sure that he has very little sense, either common or uncommon-such men there are who will tell you that all knowledge consists of facts, that every thing else is mere talk and theory, and that nothing has any value except facts. Those

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