present time there are at least six or seven distinct theories of evolution before the scientific world, and nearly all of them are overburdened with doctrines which have no bearing whatever on the primary and essential hypothesis. In conclusion, while we welcome all scientific discoveries as we do any additions to human knowledge and power, we reserve to ourselves the right of suspending our judgment and withholding our belief (though admitting heartily the whole force of opposite considerations) in the tentative efforts and the provisional hypotheses of our scientific teachers which transcend the sphere of experience and fact. Truth will make her own way, we need not be anxious on her account. She needs no flourish of trumpets, to announce her triumphs, and we think nothing will be gained in her cause by making a grand parade of successes which have yet to be achieved, and by anticipating victories yet to be won. This is not the way conquests have been gained either in war or science. And the historian of the 19th century will have to record most of the scientific inventions and discoveries, which have signalised our age, as having been made by men of non-professional initiation, outside learned bodies and societies,-who possessed with a vigorous practical sense, and untrammelled by theories followed unswervingly the trail of discovery to the logical or practical end,—that of resistless demonstration ;—and their lives might have been barren of scientific results had they turned aside to wander in the bewildering mazes of speculation. "Hooded and wrapped about with that strange and antique garb, there walks a kingly, a most royal soul, even as the Emperor Charles walked, amidst solemn cloisters under a monk's cowl-a monarch still in soul."-Longfellow. THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS CARLYLE. ERHAPS there is not to be found in the whole range PERHAPS there not to fter of English literature a greater literary phenomenon than the subject of our present study, Thomas Carlyle. In the peculiar constitution of his mind there are many seeming heterogeneous elements which give to him as a writer, if not originality, yet a marked individuality, distinguishing him from all others. In him there is all the earnest, practical energy characteristic of the objective mind of the Scotch, combined with the vivid imagination and deep subjective mind of the German. His ideas are expressed in language wild, grotesque, and sometimes terrible, such as men may long remember; in fact, our language does not give full play to the singular freaks of his wild fancy. In it he is "cabined, cribbed, confined," and anon he breaks through into sentences half German, half English, mingled with slang, street cries, and words which cannot be found in either ancient or modern lexicons, yet relieved here and there by bursts of eloquence as grand and impressive as can be found in our literature. A rabble of manœuvre. unknown authors, unheard-of editors and correspondents, start up in nearly every page, lay siege to your understanding, and play off all manner of quaint pranks of rhetorical Unverifiable quotations from Teufelsdröckh, Herr Sauerteig, M'Crowdy, Crabbe, and Co., the Houndsditch editor, Jefferson Brick the Yankee, and a host of others, are pitted against you in the rear and the flank, while hard and unpronounceable words are knocked against your brains in order to compel your judgment to surrender. These are the means our author uses to go round and through his subject, and to present it in all its possible lights. Nothing is too high or too low, and all human life is interesting to him, whether in the pages of the Newgate Calendar or the Book of Martyrs. It has been well said that "unprepared readers, coming for the first time upon the writings of Thomas Carlyle, are apt enough to be confounded and repelled. It is like finding one's self alone on a desolate road, with a big, suspicious-looking, bludgeon-armed fellow-traveller; now, you fancy he is about to strike you, now, to leave you when you really need his help. At one moment he is talking with the most unequivocally sardonic scorn, of some institution, or function, or thought, you have been taught to hallow; at another he is squelching the very brains out of some poor devilkin who has tried to insult the said institution, function, or thought, in some other fashion than his. Then, he will appeal to you, to all that is manly and godly in you, to give your assent to some quite oldworld truth which you never knew yourself doubting; then he will seriously ask you, whether you suppose things are going on in and around you as they ought. Anon, he has |