foretold that in commerce was at last found the true link to bind together all the races of man in a common. brotherhood, that henceforward war would be too dear; all future contests would be friendly rivalries, the victors giving the vanquished the very weapons of their success. It was easy to predict such things in the calm of that sunny year. Look back at the sudden storms of war that have marked the eleven years with such great events, that the Exhibition seems to have been the work of a former age. Four wars, too terrible to last, have shaken every part of the world. The Crimea, India, Italy, and America, are written in our history in larger characters than any industrial triumph. Sad and cruel wars indeed, yet wars that have proved something more than that industry is the highest good. Our heroes of Inkermann, our martyrs of India, the gigantic figure of Garibaldi, find no parallels in the placid annals of peaceful times. The wicked war in the West tells us more; for it proclaims that those who set up trade as their god can look to no other for help, until unmeasured calamities shall have changed their evil, faithless hearts. Let those who think that commerce will ever lead to universal peace look at the progress of warlike ideas as shown in this very Exhibition; let them see among the chief objects of interest the vast guns that shatter plates of iron, the huge cruel-looking Armstrong-trophy, the models of armour-covered ships; let them see how the unarmed multitude is now mixed with the representatives of that great free army which necessity has suddenly called forth. Every where are heard fears and doubts. One word from the silent Emperor, and half Europe is in arms.

Is, then, universal peace to be banished from our hopes? Surely not. If Christianity is true, we must still long for the union of mankind, still pray that all strife and warfare may be calmed for ever. But when we so hope and pray, we must remember that to work this great change is the mission of religion; and that when industry has conducted us to the borders of a better state, she can go no further, but must yield her place to religion, trusting that religion can prove that the noblest earthly aspirations of man are practical verities, not unsubstantial, idle dreams.

The Battle of the Ethnologists,

AMONG the wars and rumours of wars which give us small and great tribulations, not the least perplexing in the anticipation is the coming grand fight of the ethnologists. Already have we been agitated by preparatory skirmishings; and we are now looking forward with a befitting horror to a tremendous engagement, which will bring into action the great guns of science, and the horse, foot, and dragoons of reviews, magazines, and newspapers.

Before the combat deepens, and the smoke of battle covers the field, we propose to take a glance at the questions involved, and the marshalled forces of the eager and exasperated belligerents, that we may the better understand the future Austerlitzes and Waterloos, the Bull Runs and Donelsons of the opening campaign.

Dropping our metaphor, which grows too hot for longer handling, let us take a glimpse at the great question which bids fair to occupy the minds of scientific and theological controversialists until it is-shall we say?-settled.

Unsettled, rather. Have we not rested quietly in the time-honoured faith of our ancestors: that all mankind are the descendants of Adam and Eve, and that, when the earth was drowned in the great Deluge, Noah became our second sole progenitor? The common faith in the declaration of Scripture, "that God hath made of one blood all the nations that dwell upon the face of the earth,"—so that all men are brethren of one great family,-is assailed by men of science, whose theories, if sustained, must either set aside the inspired Word, or force us to give it new interpretations, if it be possible by any interpretation to reconcile it with the demands of the new philosophy.

It is not the first time. We have had, during the past century, several strong battles over the same ground. Astronomy, physical geography, and geology, have all been brought in turn against faith in Revelation. The telescope was to demolish the Pentateuch, and sweep all superstitions out of the minds of men, as a broom sweeps cobwebs from a neglected chamber. The Deluge was declared a physical impossibility. The geolo. gists ridiculed the Mosaic account of the Creation. Well; vast numbers of people became well versed in astronomy, in physical geography, and, to some extent, in geology. Do we find that religion has suffered in consequence? There is a more solid faith and a more earnest piety to-day than in the middle of the eighteenth century.

The new assault upon generally received religious and historical ideas, it may be confessed, assumes, at the first glance, a somewhat formidable appearance. The ethnological polygenesists assert that, during the whole historic period, there have existed the same differences in the human races that are seen at the present time. The sallow, oblique-eyed, flat

faced, and high-cheek-boned Mongolian was the same three thousand years ago that he is to-day. The Negro, from tropical Africa, as he is represented upon the oldest monuments of Egypt, is the same black-skinned, woolly-headed, thick-lipped, flat-nosed biped that we find him after thirty centuries have rolled over him, without improving, or perceptibly changing, either his physical aspect or social condition, except in those cases in which he has been brought into an involuntary pupilage to a higher race and civilisation. Then, as now, his small brain was set behind, rather than above, his projecting face, and he was the bewer of wood and drawer of water-the captured or purchased slave of his white or tawny brother; and the oldest statue or picture, rude Egyptian painting, or sculptured tablet from Nineveh, which dates back nearest the Deluge, represents the lofty-browed Caucasian as we see him to-day. Change but slightly the costume of the Egyptian who now guides the traveller among the ruins of Thebes, and many of the ancient statues would answer for his portrait.

It does not do, then, to say that white men of the Caucasian type have gradually changed to yellow Mongols, or Red Indians, or Negroes, by the influences of climate and temperature. They have not changed in three thousand years. We have no reason to believe that the Negro would become a Caucasian in England or in Nova Zembla in a thousand generations, or that the posterity of Englishmen living in the heart of Africa would ever be changed to Negroes. They might grow very darkcomplexioned even in a single season; but a dark-complexioned white man is very far from being a Negro, or an Indian, or a Japanese, or an Australian. The theory of gradual climatic changes must, we think, be abandoned, and the monogenesists must withdraw or spike their guns, and fall back upon a new line of defences.

This quarrel of the mono- and poly genesists, to borrow an economical bit of word-craft from our Teutonic neighbours, is a very pretty one as it stands; but it is complicated by the theory, boldly advanced, and maintained in high quarters, that men were not created at all, either in a single race or type, or in three, five, eleven, or whatever number of distinct races may be claimed by the most advanced polygenesists. According to the developmentalists, who have got rid of all necessity for a creation, and have by consequence no use for a creator, the various races of men, as well as all other animals, grew, or gradually developed themselves in the progress of ages, from lower forms of animal life, beginning with the animalcule, which seems but a point of animate existence. to how that begins no notion is given us; but we are to suppose that all the myriad forms of animal life have been self-developed, under the influence of external circumstances, and by the stimulus of internal desires, from those germs of being, whose origin and constitution must puzzle the boldest speculator. An animalcular globule, for example, finds itsel hungry, and with long and patient effort develops a mouth and digestive apparatus. Pursued by other hungry animalcules, it either puts out a

As

tail or other propelling apparatus to enable it to swim away from its enemies; or, in the cold perspiration of fear, it secretes a shell to protect itself from their voracity or, if gifted with courage and a belligerent disposition, it grows weapons of offence and defence,lo Encouraged by the success of such efforts, and expanding with ambitious desires for pressing appetites, these oselfmader people of the seas become fishes, and then lengthen into sea-serpents or thickene into whales. Some, taking a fancy to an agreeable promenade on shore, grow themselves legs, and become ichthyosaurians and alligatorso Of these, some finds their big unwieldy tails anginconvenience, and either drop them, like the tadpole when hits becomes a frog, drilets them dwindle into slender and genteel caudal appendages while lengthening their legs, and developing a few other trifling capabilities, they become cows, horses, donkeys, and other mammalian quadrupeds Others, with more volatile aspirations, change their scales into feathers instead of hair, and their forelegs into wings, becoming owls or eagles, herons or hummingbirds, according to their several fancies Wherei grass is plentiful, crocodiles would naturally becomes buffaloes, but as these wander off into forests, where grass is scant, and they are obliged to browse on the branches of trees, reaching higher and higher, their necks and legs gradually lengthen, and the humpy little buffalo stretches up into the stately giraffe Others take to bristles, and root and revel in the luxury of snouts, ambitious of the glories of prize porkers in Baker-Street bazaarsi Strangely dissatisfied with even these huge dimensions, they go on expanding in bulk and lengthening in snout, until they stalk before us the elephants of Astley's and the menageries Cowardly-spirited animals develop good legs for running, as the elk or the antelope while the fierce and brave get to themselves savage claws and teeth, and, despising herbage and fruits, adopt an exclusively carnivorous dietat mosol paveg tedi je doda u en Living in tropical forests, where lofty trees are covered with delicious fruitsy animals with hoofs or clumsy paws would try in vain to climb them. But in a few generations such wishes and efforts change the hoofs and paws into hands, expressly adapted to climbing trees and plucking their fruits and nature rejoices in many tribes of monkeys, of various sizes, colours, and forms, according to the varying aspirations of their self-creating and industriously developing progenitors. Some of these human approximations cultivate their tails, and find them both useful and ornamental; but the larger, stronger, graver, and more dignified of our four-handed relations get tired or ashamed of these ridiculous appendages, which straightway shorten, and then disappear. We have come now to the chimpanzee and the gorilla. They have four hands and "nary tail. It occurs to some of the more enlightened of these gentlemen of the forests, that if they were to lengthen their hind-legs, and walk upright, it would improve their personal appearance. The posterior hands gradually subside into feet, their thumbs become great toes, and, voilà! MAN walks upon the scene; and we have only to carry the developmental

1

ལ

process a little further to account for the existence of all the human races. Soon a Homer sings, a Plato reasons, a Demosthenes thrills us with eloquence, a Praxiteles gives us ideal beauty in marble, a Phidias makes it glowing with the colours of life. Science, Philosophy, Poetry, Art, are the glorious climax of development, until, after ages of progress, a Du Chaillu finds, and a Spurgeon improves upon, the wonderful animal whose aspirations made him the transition-link between the brute and human results of the theory of development.

It is a nice theory, and has only a few slight difficulties. It requires a potent intelligence in each individual form, moulding the physical, and gradually changing it in correspondence with its own growth and aspirations. Atoms of unknown origin, self-expanding through successive generations, by growing necessities, or desires, or caprices, until they become sharks or whales, geese or nightingales, rats or elephants, kangaroos or gorillas, open to us a view of animated nature which some may consider sublime, but which to us seems full of absurdities.

It is quite true that man has existed since the period of records and monuments without much change in his physical conformation, and with the same striking differences of race that now exist; but the same is true of the whole animal creation. Horses, dogs, cats, sheep, camels, lions,-all birds, beasts, fishes, and insects,-have been the same as far back as we can trace them. Other races have existed, and become extinct; but we find no marks of transition into the existing races. In three thousand years there have been no such changes. There is nowhere the slightest appearance of the lower forms of life changing to higher. The oysters on our coast are doubtless the same coppery bivalves that they were when Julius Cæsar made his first meal off them upon the sands of Dover; and the donkey in our streets, drawing his load of cabbages, is no improvement upon the beast that gave a lesson to Balaam. If the law of development ever existed, it must have ceased to act some thousands of years ago. Progress has made a halt, and all animate existences have forgotten their aspirations.

It is true that no man can stand before a cage of monkeys, or see a cleverly-trained one exhibited in the street, without an awkward feeling of possible relationship. The imitation is too close to be agreeable. But when a careful comparison is made, this feeling vanishes. There is a wide difference between the highest type of the Caucasian and the lowest Bushman or Australian; but he who pretends that the lowest human being that walks the earth is a nearer relation to the gorilla than to himself, has not given the subject a proper examination. He should go at once to the British Museum, and inspect the skeleton, and particularly the skull, of the gorilla. It is the head of a beast. Its brains are not one fifth the size of the smallest normal human brain ever exhibited. Its skull is more like that of a tiger than of a human being. With the first look at the naked skeleton all idea of relationship vanishes. It is true that there are other specimens of the monkey tribe, with larger brains in pro

VOL. V.

P