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were the only persons in the world. And then, if they are like Him, they will all show love to every one about them, and to everything beautiful, and good, and true.

"He prayeth best who loveth best,

All things, both great and small;
For the dear Lord to whom we pray,

He made and loveth all."

Thanking you and them again for your most friendly feelings, and hoping that they may not again deprive themselves of any comfort, I am, dear sir, yours most truly, DAVID LIVINGSTONE.

Mr. John Thornton, Stockport.

While on the subject of Africa we may glance at a singular controversy which was revived in 1859, the associations of which are more important than the discussion itself. As early as 1847 several rumours had reached England of the discovery in Central Africa of an enormous ape, the conformation of which was said to approach so nearly to that of man that it might be regarded as the link between the human being and the brute creation. This creature, it was said, frequently walked upright; was of such enormous strength that it was scarcely afraid of the lion; could climb trees, from which it would reach down its long arm, clutch a passing native by the throat, and strangle him in its powerful grasp. It had been known to arm itself with an enormous bludgeon, and to lie upon a branch waiting to stun other animals as they passed beneath, or even furtively to attack the elephant. Its muscular force was prodigious, its fierceness terrible, and though it showed little intelligence, and was called by the negroes "the stupid old man," it was supposed to possess a kind of malicious and self-protecting craft. Only some part of the skeletons and the crania of the animals were first sent here, but in 1859 a young specimen was captured and forwarded to Europe. Professor Owen lectured upon the formation of the "gorilla," as it was called, and pointed out the differences between its structure and that of the lowest order of negro. The newspapers were full of it, and serious orthodox people felt some alarm lest the confirmation, or supposed confirmation,

of these reports should do injury to religious belief, while others were rather disgusted at being suspected of having had so repulsive an

ancestor.

At the end of the year 1859, however, the "missing link" had become a byword because of the agitation caused by Dr. Darwin's theory of "the origin of species" by natural selection, which very few people had given themselves the trouble to examine or to understand, but about which there was an almost universal outery of praise, ridicule, fear, or condemnation. A very large number of those who are sometimes spoken of as "the religious world" were at once in violent hostility to the theory, which, without hesitation, was declared to be opposed to revealed truth, and to be destructive of the very foundations of faith. It did not seem to occur to these reasoners that their own faith could have little foundation if it could be upset by a mere scientific speculation, and the more thoughtful minds were not indisposed to wait for further explanations of what the eminent naturalist meant, before pronouncing that either revelation or belief was endangered by his theorizing. There were, on the other hand, people who repelled the notion of the development of species, because it was, they thought, opposed to the true dignity of man as an intelligent, emotional, and reflecting being, with a spiritual nature. Men like Kingsley, and of course a great many of less calibre, were at first vehemently against it. While they treated such speculations with serious rebuke and sarcasm, the wits and humorists, whether they accepted the theory or not, found in it an endless theme for jests and comic illustrations. The rash critics who, like Kingsley, knew enough of natural history to give the subject some subsequent examinations, afterwards mitigated and many of them tacitly revoked their former conclusions. strict examination the theory-and it was only put forward as a theory-became much less dangerous to sacred beliefs and the truths of revelation than had been supposed. Those who had already necessarily accepted the scientific conclusions from geological discoveries had to reflect that an absolutely literal interpretation of our version of the first book of the

On

SCIENTIFIC SPECULATION-"THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES."

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Scriptures need not be insisted on as a test of orthodoxy, and numbers of men of science known to be devout and pious Christians were ready to give their admiration, if not their immediate adhesion, to the extensive generalization which had resulted in speculations so wide and yet so inclusive as those of Darwin. The theory of natural selection, that is, of the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for existence, represented that during a long course of descent, species of plants and animals are modified by the selective preservation of slightly varied forms, adapted somewhat better than their fellows to the circumstances in which they are placed. The modification of species was not an absolutely new doctrine, and even Darwin, who carried it out to what he believed to be legitimate conclusions, did not confidently assert how far it would extend. He did not assert, he merely indicated by expressing his own convictions. He had put forth a suggestion, and though his own observations had led him to regard it as a conclusive discovery, he left it to be verified by others as he thought he had verified it to himself. "I cannot doubt," he said, "that the theory of descent, with modification, embraces all the members of the same class. I believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number." But speculatively he went farther. 66 Analogy would lead me one step farther," he said, "namely, to the belief that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype; but this inference is chiefly grounded on analogy, and it is immaterial whether or not it be accepted. The case is different with the members of each great class, as the Vertebrata, the Articulata, &c.; for here we have distinct evidence that all have descended from a single parent."

This of course is not the place to discuss the probable truth or error of such conclusions; we have only to concern ourselves for the moment with their historical relations, and to note that the opinions of the greater number of Darwin's opponents were soon afterwards modified or retracted. In less than ten years Professor Huxley (who was one of the earliest and most ardent advocates of the same theory)

could say in a lecture at the Royal Institution, that so rapidly had these conclusions been accepted and established that he began to think they would shortly require for their welfare a little healthful opposition. This of course was a somewhat humorous way of putting it; but it is a very striking fact that a statement which, when first definitely put forth in November, 1859, was received with a storm of ridicule, indignation, and even execration, soon came to be regarded with quiet attention, and though it continued to be opposed on scientific as well as on religious grounds, gained considerably by the reaction which succeeded its first reception. Educated and even half educated people who had been among those who raised the outcry against the propounder of the theory and had loaded him with epithets, began to be a little ashamed of having so treated a man who was known to be a devout believer in religion, and who concluded his treatise by saying: "From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on, according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved."

Charles Darwin may be said to have been a born scientific investigator. His father was Dr. R. W. Darwin, F.R.S., his grandfather the famous Dr. Erasmus Darwin, author of the Botanic Garden and Zoonomia. From Shrewsbury grammar-school he went to Edinburgh University for two years, and thence to Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1831, when he was twenty-two years old. In the same year, having heard that Captain Fitzroy, who was about to sail on a voyage of circumnavigation in her majesty's ship Beagle, had offered to share his cabin with any competent naturalist, Darwin applied for the appointment. His "Journal of Researches into the Geology and Natural History of the

Various Countries visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle round the world" is the delightful record of this journey, and shows how ardently the young naturalist had pursued his studies in zoology and geology, and how widely they had reached in various areas of inquiry, though botany was the favourite pursuit. This voyage vastly increased the scientific knowledge of the young inquirer, but it permanently injured his health, and sowed the seeds of weakness of the chest and heart, the disease of which he died. But Darwin, though he was frequently an invalid, performed an amazing amount of work requiring great patience and arduous attention, and he lived to be seventy-three, having read two papers before the Linnæan Society only a year before his death, at about the time of the publication of a remarkable work on earthworms, respecting which his investigations had shown the enormous importance of the part they play in the world, by gradually covering the surface of the earth with a layer of mould.

Darwin received the gold medal of the Royal Society in 1853, and the Wollaston Palladian medal of the Geological Society in 1859. In 1875 the University of Leyden conferred upon him the honorary degree of M.D., and in 1877 the University of Cambridge made him a Doctor of Laws. He married in 1839 the granddaughter of Josiah Wedgwood, F.R.S., the well-known manufacturer of artistic earthenware. We have noted that his work on the Origin of Species had, even at the period which we are now considering, begun to find acceptance with many, and was no longer mentioned with such detestation as it had met with on its first appearance. Of that book he afterwards said: "It seemed to me sufficient to indicate that by this work 'light would be thrown on the origin of man and his history,"" for this implied that man "must be included with other organic beings in any general conclusion respecting his manner of appearance on this earth." These words occur in a more recent and even more startling book, the Descent of Man, in which Darwin dealt at length, and boldly, with that subject on which he had hitherto deemed it well

to be reticent, and presented man as descending from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, and probably a climber of trees, and traced back the chain of descent until he found as the progenitor of all the vertebrate animals, some aquatic creature with brain, heart, and other organs imperfectly developed. This book gave another shock to those (a great majority of course) who had not accepted the conclusions of the former one; but it is to be noted that it was received with very different demonstrations as a theoretical contribution to science, by a man, who had already implied that he would not stop short in tracing the development of the higher organizations from the extremest point of animal life, and who saw in this theory a nobler conception of Divine creative power than in that usually received and adopted.

Whatever opinions may be held on the subject, it cannot be doubted that the minute investigations and avowed conclusions of Dr. Darwin and of Mr. Huxley-who may rather be regarded as his independent colleague and supporter than as his follower-have done much to change the scope and method of scientific inquiry and experiment, in relation to the remoter forms of animal and vegetable life and organization.

We must now return to glance at what was going on in parliament, and that reminds us that we have not quite done with the financial statement of 1860, and with all that was involved by the adoption of the terms of the commercial treaty with France. We have already seen that some agitation had been made at various periods for the abolition of the taxes on paper. On the 2d of February, 1859, a demonstration against the retention of excise or any other duties on paper had been made at Exeter Hall. Mr. Milner Gibson presided, and was supported by a number of influential gentlemen. Mr. William Chambers of Edinburgh made a telling speech, and was followed by Dr. Watts, who represented that the paper-duty was a tax on literature, an obstruction to education, an impediment to commerce, and a hindrance to production; that it interfered with the process of manufacture,

REPEAL OF THE PAPER DUTIES OPPOSED BY THE LORDS.

repressed industry, and injured the public revenue. The meeting called upon Mr. Gibson still further to press the House of Commons on the subject of the abolition of the duties, so that in the ensuing session arrangements might be made to dispense with the tax. A petition to the House of Commons was then unanimously adopted.

The abolition of these taxes came not unnaturally into the scheme of the commercial treaty, and the provisions of the budget of 1860 included the remission not only of the excise duty on paper, but of the import duty on paper coming from abroad.

That duty had been three-halfpence a pound, and some of the principal paper-makers in the country represented that it was no more than sufficient to enable them to hold their own against foreign competition. The reply to this was that the abolition of the excise duty not only required, but, by the terms of the commercial treaty, demanded, the remission of the import duty on paper coming from France. One of the clauses of that treaty provided that we should have the right of placing an import duty on French goods of sufficient amount to counterbalance any excise duty which might be laid on the same class of goods in England, and it was argued that this should be honourably interpreted to mean that the abolition of the excise duty on an article required the free admission of the same kind of article from France. This was regarded as rather a strained interpretation of the provision of the treaty, but the paper-makers had another argument in the fact that while it was proposed to remit the import duty on French paper, the French would maintain such a large export duty on their rags (the raw material of paper), that they could not be obtained in the English market except at a price which placed our manufacturers under a considerable disadvantage. Hitherto there had been a prohibition of the export of rags from France, and though an export duty was to be adopted instead of absolute prohibition, the abandonment of the duty on foreign paper coming to this country while the supply of foreign rags to English paper-makers was saddled with a duty which greatly enhanced their cost, was a dis

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tinct injustice. The controversy on this question was long and sometimes violent, and it was admitted at the time that there was inequality of interests from which English paper-makers would suffer, but on the other hand it was argued that the general benefits to be derived from the treaty could not be rejected, much less could the avowed principles of free-trade be disavowed for the sake of maintaining the balance of advantage for one particular industry. Looking at the question from the point of view of the consumer it was asked why the benefits of our free-trade policy should be restricted because of the remaining "protective" legislation of the French government, and why an import duty should be maintained on French paper for the purpose of making paper in England dearer than it otherwise would be. The opponents of the Paper Duties Bill, which formed, as it were, a separate part of the general financial measure, were active and were able to secure the support of influential friends, so that although the second reading was carried in the House of Commons by a majority of 53, that majority was reduced to 9 on the third reading. This result encouraged an effort to oppose the bill in the House of Lords, and the effort was for a time successful. Lord Monteagle (formerly Mr. Spring Rice and Whig chancellor of the exchequer) gave notice of a motion to reject the bill, and Lord Derby and Lord Chelmsford agreed to support him.

A crisis was imminent, because, if the Lords claimed the power to reject this portion of the financial scheme of the chancellor of the exchequer, they thereby demanded the authority to interfere with, or reimpose, the taxation of the country in opposition to the Commons. There were those, and among them the aged Lord Lyndhurst, who argued that, though the Peers had not exerted authority to alter a money bill, they had a right to refuse their assent to a repeal of taxation, and that this was an instance in which the exercise of that right would be justified. Lord Cranworth, the lord chancellor, on the other hand, urged that the proposed course, if not strictly speaking an unconstitutional proceeding, was so thinly separated from it that the distinction

would be imperceptible to ordinary minds. But the House of Lords had been apparently well canvassed. As was afterwards the case in the Church Rate Bill, the majority in favour of the repeal of the paper duty had dwindled in the House of Commons. A considerable number of the members of the Upper House went down to have their fling at the chancellor of the exchequer and the free-traders. When the Paper Duties Bill was brought up it was rejected on the second reading by a majority of eighty-nine, and the Lords had assumed a right, which it was afterwards averred they had been distinctly prohibited from claiming by repeated decisions entered upon parliamentary records, to the effect that the whole provision for supply and for the taxation, or the remission of the taxation of the country, rested with the Commons alone. To say the least of it, this action of the Lords was a very serious challenge to the Lower House, and a direct claim of power to annul its financial plans. It was expected that a collision between the two houses must follow, and there was some surprise, if not actual disappointment, when it was found that Lord Palmerston was quite unlikely to accept the decision against the paper duties as a reason for a ministerial crisis. Probably he cared almost as little about the remission of the duties, or the free importation of foreign paper, as the majority of the opponents of the measure; but he cared a great deal about not being exposed to the necessity for resignation or for the dissolution of parliament, or even for raising a whirlwind of defiance of the Lords. He was growing old; he was in power, and was likely to remain so for some time longer. He had no desire to initiate or to champion further political reforms, and the free-trade movement had gone rather beyond the tether which he had regarded as the extent of its operations. His policy was to quiet both houses, if possible to induce the Lords to recede by making the way to back out easy for them, and to avoid the break up of the government, which might follow the persistent rejection of the scheme of the chancellor of the exchequer, on whose financial achievements he afterwards had to rely in order to support

the claims of the ministry against an attack upon its general policy. Instead of assailing the House of Lords, the prime minister gave notice that he should move for a select committee to examine the journals of the House of Lords for precedents for the course which had been adopted in that house with regard to the bill for the repeal of the paper duties, and disclaimed any intention on the part of the government of taking steps which might bring the two houses into collision. The committee was appointed. It was little more than a formality; but it served to delay agitation, and delay to popular agitation usually means its prevention. As a matter of fact, however, though there was a good deal of apparent excitement, which was kept up by the popular cheap newspapers and by those who felt in its full force the antagonism of the Lords, the public took the matter almost as coolly as Lord Palmerston did. Not because they were altogether indifferent to the question in its relation to free-trade, nor because they did not understand the danger of the precedent which the House of Lords sought to establish; but for the reason that they refused to believe in the probability of the House of Commons ultimately giving way. On this occasion, as on many others, Palmerston had pretty accurately noted the temper of the country. He thought he saw a possible way out of the difficulty by giving time for the antagonists of the Paper Duties Bill to reflect. The committee took two months to consider what they should say. What the majority agreed to say was in effect, that they could hardly decide that the privileges of the House of Commons made it actually unconstitutional for the House of Lords to reject a bill imposing a particular tax. Mr. Bright, who was on the committee, was in the minority, and drew up a statement contending, and giving weighty reasons for the contention, that the power to refuse the repeal of a tax, when that repeal had been voted by the House of Commons, was equivalent to depriving the latter of its absolute control over the taxation of the country. There can be little doubt that this view was sound, or the principle of taxation and representation going together would have to be

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