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 THE 
 
 UNCERTAINTIES 
 
 OF 
 
 MODEEN PHYSICAL SCIENCE. 
 
 BEING 
 
 THE ANNUAL ADDRESS 
 
 OF THE 
 
 Delivered at the House of the Society of Arts, on the 29th May, 1876. 
 
 BY 
 
 THE REV. CANON BIRKS, M.A., 
 
 Knighthidge Professor of Moral Philosophy, Cariilridge. 
 
 TO WHICH IS ADDED 
 
 THE REPORT FOR THE YEAR, &c. 
 
 FOURTH EDITION. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 (iSublisJjcU for tfje Enstttute) 
 Messrs. HAEDWICKE & BOGUE, 192, PICCADILLY, W 
 MKS9RS. S. BAGSTER k SONS, 15, PATERNOSTER ROW, E.G. 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
 
 SUMMARY OF THE PROCEEDINGS AT THE TENTH ANNUAL 
 MEETING OP THE VICTORIA INSTITUTE, HELD AT THE 
 HOUSE OF THE SOCIETY OF ARTS, 29th MAY, 1876. 
 
 1st Resolution.— The adoption of the Report. Moved by J. E. Howard, 
 Esq., F.R.S. ; Seconded by Admiral Nolloth, R.N. 
 
 2nd Resolution. — The vote of thanks to the Council and Honorary Officers. 
 
 The Right Rev. Bishop Rtan, D.D., in moving this resolution, said the 
 publications of the Institute had done a very large amount of good in com- 
 bating the infidelity which was, unfortunately, too prevalent at the 
 present time, arising from erroneous views as to the true results of scientific 
 discovery, and from the rash adoption of such pseudo-phUosophical and quasi- 
 scientific theories as tended to undermine the belief in revealed religion ; 
 and so also had the lectures ; and argued that such a central society for the 
 defence of Christianity was of paramount importance at the present time, 
 and referred to the comparatively small cost at which the Society accom- 
 plished its work, the average of the item for salaries for the last five years 
 having been at the rate of £38 per annum. 
 
 Mr. Mark J. Stewart, M.P., seconded the resolution and alluded to the 
 
 z ealous and pleasing manner in which the executive always carried on the 
 
 work of the Institute, and called attention to the fact that the Transactions 
 
 of the Institute had been extensively circulated on the Continent, in the 
 
 United States and the Colonies, and now even among the peoples of India. 
 
 The Right Honourable Stephen Cave, M.P., regretted that his duties at 
 the House of Commons had prevented him being in time to move the first reso- 
 lution ; he would, however, ask permission to support this one. (Cheers.) In 
 doing so he paid a tribute to the " energy, zeal, tact, and discretion " exercised 
 by the honorary oSicers. He stated that he agreed with every word which 
 had been spoken by the previous speaker as to the good which had been 
 eff"ected by the publications and lectures of the Institute. The scepticism of 
 the present day was a very difiicult problem to deal with ; there were 
 political sceptics of the stamp produced by the first French Revolution, who 
 looked upon Religion as a part of the political institutions to which they ob- 
 jected. There were men who were sceptics from the pride of intellect, who 
 refused to give adherence to things which did not tally with their ideas, and 
 there were honest sceptics, who doubted that which their intellect did not 
 understand. These last were the product of imperfect education, and with 
 them the Society had most to do. Even if the Institute had done
 
 IV 
 
 nothing more than show that the inconsistency of those who refuse to believe 
 in Christianity was greater than that of those who did believe in it, it would 
 have done a groat amount of good. We were in a transition state, and new 
 discoveries in science were being made every day ; but we might rest assured 
 that every scientific discovery, if an absolute truth, would not be inconsistent 
 with Divine Revelation. 
 
 The Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G. — " As President of this Institute, I have 
 now a very agreeable duty to perform, which is to present the testimonial 
 before you to Captain F. Petrie, who has devoted more than fi^ve years of 
 his time to the work of this Society (during which jjeriod it has 
 risen from 200 to 694 members), and whose patience, good humour, zeal, tact, 
 and assiduity have done so much to bring it up to its present position. 
 I am sure those who belong to the Society will heartily endorse what I have 
 said, and what is here inscribed, 
 
 " ' Presented, with a Purse of 100 Sovereigns, to Captain Francis 
 \V. H. Petrie (late 11th Regiment), by the President and Council of the 
 Victoria Institute, or Philosophical Society of Great Britain, in testimony 
 of their high esteem, and in recognition of the very energetic and valuable 
 services ho has rendered as Honoraiy Secretary to the Society.' " 
 
 Captain F. Petrie having expressed his warm acknowledgments — 
 Professor Birks then read the Address ; after which — 
 
 Mr. S. D. Waddy, Q.C, M.P., moved the 3rd resolution, that the thanks 
 of the Institute be presented to Professor Birks for the Address, and 
 also to all who have read papers during the session, and called attention 
 to the great value of every Annual Address that had been delivered 
 since the Institute's foundation, adding that they would form an 
 admirable volume by themselves. Mr. C. Brooke, F.R.S., seconded 
 the resolution. 
 
 The Rev, R. Thornton, D.D., moved and the Rev. Preb. Irons seconded 
 the 4th resolution — a vote of thanks to the President, the Right Hon. 
 the Earl of Shaftesbury, K.C, for taking the chair. 
 
 Refreshments were afterwards served in the Museum.
 
 THE ANNUAL ADDRESS. 
 
 THE UNCERTAINTIES OF MODERN PHYSICAL 
 SCIENCE. 
 
 My Lord Shaftesbuky, Ladies and Gentlemen. 
 
 The word Science^ now somuchin vogue^ occurs once 
 only in our English version of the New Testament. It is where 
 St. Paul counsels Timothy to avoid "profane and vain babblings 
 and oppositions of science falsely so called, which some profes- 
 sing have erred concerning the faith.''' 
 
 Those Gnostic heresies and speculations, to which the warn- 
 ing first applied, are extinct long ago. Nothing is left of them 
 but some fossil skeletons in the works of the Fathers. But 
 oppositions of pretended science to the Christian faith have 
 revived in other forms, and exist at the present day. In the 
 name of scientific progress, faith in God, in a life to come, and 
 in supernatural revelation, has been vigorously assailed. The 
 chief leaders in this philosophical sect may be called Agnos- 
 tics, and their creed Agnosticism. They affirm that of a Creator, 
 a First Cause, a Supreme Governor of the universe, nothing 
 whatever can be known. But by way of compensation they 
 claim that their own advance in natural knowledge is '' all but 
 infinite,^' compared with their predecessors. From this lofty 
 pedestal they affect to look down upon all faith in a living, 
 personal God, and supernatural religion, as a superstition that 
 is waxing old, and ready to vanish away. 
 
 A severe moral conflict is thus forced on all Christian 
 believers. And in this strife, which cannot be avoided, a purely 
 defensive attitude, a timid, apologetic tone, ill befits either the 
 dignity of their cause or the strength of their position. There 
 can be no conflict between the genuine sense of God's messages 
 to mankind, and the real facts and authentic conclusions 
 of science. But false constructions of Scripture, on the one 
 side, and the crude hypotheses or fanciful guesswork of men 
 of science, on the other, may and will contradict and clash, 
 while they depart equally from the truth. It is now the
 
 fashion with many to assume that the risk of error is wholly 
 on the side of Christian believers. Physical science as a whole, 
 including the newest and latest guesses of its students, has the 
 same infalHbility claimed for it, which is claimed by the Vatican 
 Council for the Bishop of Kome. It has been made a test, not 
 only for interpretations of the Bible, but for the Bible itself; 
 which must be rejected and cast aside, wherever it differs from 
 this new and later revelation, of which modern men of science 
 are the self-appointed prophets. Religion, we are told, consists 
 simply of blind emotions about things unknowable, while the 
 students of nature have a rightful monopoly of knowledge, 
 truth, and wisdom. 
 
 It is our duty to sift these proud claims, and see if they have 
 any warrant at all in the actual state of things. This is need- 
 ful in the interest of genuine science, no less than of Christian 
 faith. An inflated paper currency must be not less unsafe and 
 mischievous in matters of science than those of trade. Credu- 
 lity is no monopoly of religious believers. It may sometimes 
 be found even among the leaders of modern research ; while 
 among their disciples and admirers its recent growth has a 
 tropical luxuriance, and is really almost prodigious. 
 
 Physics and physiology have no doubt made great and real 
 progress in the last fifty years. But what, after all, is their 
 present stage ? Do they form a complete, mature, and perfect 
 scheme of truth, a firm and lofty pedestal, from which their 
 students may look out, unvexed themselves, like the gods of 
 Epicurus, on the tossing waves and storms of ethical debate and 
 religious controversy ? Are they not rather in a nebulous 
 stage, where a solid }iucleus of certain or nearly certain 
 truth is encompassed and concealed by a copious mist of unex- 
 plained phenomena, unproved guesses, and dim, hazy, floating 
 speculations ? Does not a vast cloudland or dreamland enve- 
 lop this world of science, shrouding it usually with a dull, 
 watery fog of thick vapour ; but ever and anon, in some wild 
 and monstrous hypothesis, streaming off, like the tail of a 
 comet, into infinite space and the outer darkness ? The second 
 and not the first, I hold to be the true description of modern 
 science, in spite of all its progress. This is true both in 
 physics, which deal with lifeless matter, and physiology, which 
 deals with liviug creatures. If true in the first, it must be 
 doubly true in the second and higher department, which all 
 confess to be more difficult and mysterious. My object in this 
 address will be to establish its truth, even in physics, and for 
 this end to consider these topics in succession ; the law of gra- 
 vitation, the nature of matter, the existence of ether ; the
 
 8 
 
 conservation of energy,, with the doctrine of evolution, and the 
 nebular theory; the dissipation of energy and the solar percus- 
 sion theory; the molten nucleus theory of the earth^s forma- 
 tion; and the astro-glacial theory of the great ice-period, 
 supposed to have lasted for ages before man appeared on the 
 earth. 
 
 I. The Law of Gravitation stands foremost among the doc- 
 trines of modern physics. The evidences of its truth have 
 gone on increasing for two full centuries, ever since the 
 Principia of Newton appeared. That any person of intelli- 
 gence should still doubt it, after it has been confirmed by all 
 the complex calculations and verified results of astronomy 
 through these two hundred years, is to me a matter of wonder 
 and amazement. 
 
 But has this truth, however firm and solid, no nebula still 
 surrounding it ? In that case, such a paper as the one in your 
 fourth volume by your former secretary, on " Current Physical 
 Astronomy,'^ would have been impossible. And that paper by 
 no means stands alone. Statements of Dr. Tyndall and Mr. 
 Spencer, and the hypotheses named by Professor Maxwell in 
 his articles on '^ Atoms ^' and " Attraction,^^ prove still more 
 decisively how much remains debated, uncertain, and obscure, 
 even in the most certain of scientific truths. 
 
 And first, what do we mean by a physical law ? Dr. Tyn- 
 dall answers boldly, a fatal necessity, Torricelli, Newton, the 
 scientific men of the present day, all knew, he says, that the 
 succession, besides being permanent, is necessary ; that the 
 gravitating force must produce the observed course of the sea- 
 sons. " If the force be permanent, the phenomena are neces- 
 sary, whether they do or do not resemble what has gone before. 
 Nothing has occurred to indicate that the operation of the 
 laws has ever been suspended, or nature ci'ossed by spontane- 
 ous action.^' Hence miracles are incredible. Strong- in this 
 premise, the inherent necessity of natural laws, he issues an 
 imperial edict to all theologians — " Keep to the region of the 
 human heai-t ; but keep away from physical nature. Here, in 
 all fi-ankuess, I would say, you are ill-informed, self-deluded, 
 and likely to delude others.''^ 
 
 So frank a statement demands a frank and simple reply. 
 The exclusion of all theologians and believers in miracles 
 from the fields of science rests on two grounds, a plain histori- 
 cal falsehood, and a patent logical sophism. If this scientific 
 interdict is valid. Sir Isaac Newton must share in the exile 
 denounced against all Christian divines. His authority is here 
 quoted to prove that very doctrine which ho has most clearly.
 
 strongly, and pointedly denounced and condemned. According 
 to him, the law of gravitation and the other laws of nature are 
 no product of a blind and fatal necessity. "This beautiful 
 system," he says, " of sun, planets, and comets, could only 
 proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and 
 powerful being," And again — " Blind, metaphysical neces- 
 sity, which is the same always and everywhere, could produce 
 no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things 
 which we find could arise from nothing but the counsel and 
 will of a Being necessarily existing." Thus Newton is invoked 
 to establish, as a test of scientific competence, that conception 
 of natural laws, which he has plainly denounced as unscientific, 
 unreasonable, and absurd. 
 
 But the reasoning of Dr. Tyndall is here no less defective 
 than his inversion of historical truth is surprising and extreme. 
 He confounds two things wholly distinct; a hypothetical 
 necessity that certain results must follow, if such and such laws 
 operate undisturbed ; and a real necessity, that these laws 
 must continue to operate, and can never be varied or sus- 
 pended, either by some higher law unknown to us, or by the 
 free choice of the Creator. His dictum, then, is not less 
 opposed to common sense than to Newton's real teaching and 
 authority. Whenever there are diverse laws among which a 
 calculator may choose, so as to trace the consequences of one 
 or another at his pleasure, the real existence of any one of them 
 can be due to no blind fate, but, as Newton justly maintains, 
 to the wise and intelligent choice of a Divine Lawgiver. 
 
 This necessity, which Dr. Tyndall aflEirms of all natural laws, 
 Mr. Spencer also asserts of the law of gravitation, near the 
 opening of his scheme of philosophy. Physicists, he says, 
 have assumed variation by the law of the inverse square, 
 because any other was excluded by the laws of space. He 
 then proceeds to infer that repulsions, as well as attractions, 
 must follow the same law, that a body in equilibrium will re- 
 main so, if the bulk be reduced to one-eighth, or the distance 
 of all the molecules to one-half; and hence that matter can 
 ofi'er no resistance to compression. The conclusion, he re- 
 marks, is absurd. This absurdity, however, does not strilce 
 him as proving the utter falsity of the premise from which it 
 is logically derived. On the contrary, he sets it down merely 
 as one added proof that the nature of matter and of force is in- 
 conceivable. 
 
 That many other laws of force have been assumed, and their 
 mathematical results developed, is one of the most familiar and 
 patent facts in the history of dynamics. Five whole sections
 
 of the first book of the Principia are occupied with calculations 
 of this very kind. The premise, then, in this reasoning is a 
 clear historical falsehood, and the conclusion, as Mr. Spencer 
 himself admits, plainly absurd. In the third edition of his 
 work, after fifteen years, the paragraph has been silently with- 
 drawn. But no explanation has been given how this double 
 inversion of fact and logic was left so long standing sentinel 
 in the porch and gateway of the new material philosophy. 
 
 Gravitation, then, is no blind necessity, but a law of nature, 
 proved by a combination of experience and deductive reasoning, 
 and which thus implies and requires the choice of a Divine Law- 
 giver. But is it mediate or ultimate ? If mediate, so as to 
 have some other physical cause, what is the medium on which 
 it depends ? If ultimate, which is the true conception of it, 
 universal attraction, or universal appetency ? Here we find 
 the nucleus of certain truth surrounded by a large and ample 
 nebula of rival theories and doubtful speculations. 
 
 Newton has been careful to remai'kthat he gives no decision 
 on the physical cause of gravity, if such there be. '^ I use 
 the words,^^ he says, " attraction, impulse, or propensity, 
 promiscuously and indifferently one for another. Wherefore 
 the reader is not to imagine that by these words I anywhere 
 take on me to define the kind or manner of any action, the 
 causes or physical reasons thereof, or attribute forces in a true 
 and physical sense to certain centres, when I speak of them 
 as attracting, or endued with attractive powers. ■"' 
 
 Gravitation, if a mediate result, can hardly be attractive. 
 For this would require us to conceive a line physically con- 
 necting every pair of masses or atoms in every varying posi- 
 tion, and exercising a contractile power to bring them nearer. 
 Also that the contractile force should be increased, after it has 
 brought them nearer, and not, as in evei*y known case of the 
 kind, diminished. This hypothesis, then, seems never to have 
 found a patron. But the other mediate view, that gravity is 
 the result of propulsion, and that bodies and atoms are pushed 
 and driven together by pressure or impact from behind or 
 beyond, has been a very frequent view. Newton inclines to 
 it in his 21st Query. But in Query 28 he leans, I think, just 
 as plainly to the opposite notion, that gravity is one of two or 
 three ultimate principles, of which cohesive force is another, 
 which enter into the defining essence of matter, or ^' by Avhich 
 the things themselves are formed.^' 
 
 Of this general view, that gravitation results from ethereal 
 impact or pressure, there have been three varieties. First, that 
 of Le Sage, that it depends on the impact of ultramundane
 
 corpuscles, flying in streams in all directions through space. 
 He conceives them to come from beyond the limits of the 
 known universe, and to produce attraction by impact on the 
 molecules of matter, each screening its neighbour from some 
 part or fraction of this celestial bombardment. A most 
 grotesque machinery for securing the desired result ! But 
 there is a plain and fundamental objection. If the molecules 
 of matter are perfectly elastic to their etherial assailants, the 
 differential effect would cease, and the action be equal on all 
 sides. If their motion is quenched after the impact, the energy 
 thus transferred from the ether to the matter on which it 
 impinges must raise the whole universe to a white heat in a 
 few seconds. 
 
 A second theory, hinted at, rather than proposed, is of this 
 kind. " If we suppose all space filled with a uniform, incom- 
 pressible fluid, and that material bodies are always generating 
 and emitting this fluid at a constant rate, the fluid flowing oS" 
 to infinity, or else absorbing and annihilating it, the fluid 
 flowing in from infinite space, the result would be an attractive 
 tendency between any two bodies as the inverse square. ^^ On 
 this suggestion of Sir W. Thomson Professor Maxwell justly 
 observes, that such a hypothesis, of a fluid constantly flowing 
 out with no source of supply, or flowing in without any escape, 
 is so contrary to all experience that it cannot be called an 
 explanation. But, with all deference to two mathematicians 
 so eminent, I believe that the hypothesis is self-contradictory 
 and impossible. If each particle of matter is surrounded by 
 a plenum, nothing could flow out of it, for no room would be left 
 into which it could flow. If by a fluid not a plenum, but 
 homogeneous, as the hypothesis requires, it must cease to 
 be homogeneous from the first moment when the outflow 
 began. 
 
 A third hypothesis assumes that gravitation results from 
 unequal pressure of the ether on the inner and outer side of 
 each pair of masses or atoms. This is the view modestly 
 proposed in Newton's 21st query. But his mind could not 
 have found rest in it, since later on he inclines to a different 
 and really opposite view. The one thing of which he seems to 
 be sure is the exact converse of modern materialism. The main 
 business, he says, of Natural Philosophy is to argue from 
 phenomena, and deduce causes from effects, " till we come to 
 the First Cause, which is certainly not mechanical,'^ 
 
 But this attempt to explain gravity, either by vibrations of 
 ether, or differences of ethereal pressure, in spite of the high 
 names which have inclined to it or adopted it, seems to me
 
 open to a decisive and fatal objection. The action of the 
 ether is assumed to depend on variations in its density. It 
 would press equally on all sides^ and be inactive, if its density 
 were uniform. Now in ether, which was a plenum, no 
 differences of density could exist. Space could not be more 
 than perfectly full. And in elastic ether, not a plenum, the 
 chief effect of the elasticity must be to equalize the density, 
 and reduce the differences to nothing. While this change 
 was in progress, the result must be to increase the mutual 
 distance of all the matter floating in the denser portions, and 
 to bring nearer to each other those which were placed in the 
 rarer portions only. Thus, instead of universal attraction, 
 the necessary result would be attraction or nearer approach in 
 one half of space, and repulsion or further separation in the 
 other half, and by a law or rule wholly differing in both from 
 the inverse square of the distance. And when once an equal 
 density of the ether was attained, or nearly attained, all further 
 action must cease. The final result could be nothing else 
 than stagnation, silence, and death. 
 
 But if gravitation be an ultimate law, and cannot be 
 resolved into a secondary result of impact or pressure, as I 
 fully believe, a further doubt remains. Is attraction its true 
 and proper name ? When A and B are in presence, and B 
 draws nearer to A, does A pull B towards it ? Then the law 
 is rightly called one of universal attraction. Or does B seek 
 A and draw nearer to it by an inward instinct or impulse ? 
 Then the proper name of the law will be universal appetency. 
 This last, though not the usual, I hold to be the more natural 
 and reasonable view. It places the activity where the change 
 occurs, not in every other place beside. It also brings the 
 law into harmony with the higher forms of desire and appe- 
 tite in all living creatures. Instead of a type of selfishness, 
 an action that aims to contract and absorb all things into 
 itself, it becomes a type and resemblance, in matter, of that 
 higher law of human and divine love, which goes forth in 
 desire for closer union and communion with the whole universe 
 of being. 
 
 But " whether thus these things, or whether not," whether 
 gravitation be mediate or immediate, attraction or appetency, 
 I think it must be plain that the nucleus of solid truth, even 
 in Newton^s great discovery, is encompassed to this hour 
 Avith a vast nebula of what is doubtful, indeterminate, and 
 obscure. 
 
 II. The Nature of Matter is the next subject to be con- 
 sidered. Are modern materialists fully agreed in the nature of
 
 8 
 
 this new divinity, which is their only substitute for the God 
 of the Bible ? Dr. Tyndall discerns in it '' the promise and 
 the potency of all terrestrial life." Professor Huxley prophe- 
 sies " As surely as every future grows out of past and present, 
 so will the physiology of the future extend the reign of matter 
 and law, until it is coextensive with knowledge, with feeling, 
 and with action." "The consciousness of this great truth 
 weighs," he thinks, *' like a nightmare on many of the best 
 minds of the day, and they watch the progress of materialism 
 with such fear and powerless anger, as a savage feels when 
 the great shadow creeps across the sun." And Professor 
 Haeckel, of Jena, extols Kant's Nebular theory, because " it is 
 purely mechanical or monistic, makes use exclusively of the 
 forces of eternal matter, and entirely excludes every super- 
 natural process." 
 
 A philosophy, then, in which matter supersedes and swallows 
 up mind, and dispenses wholly with a God, ought surely to 
 give some distinct utterance as to the nature of its own 
 divinity. But when we look closely, what do we find ? 
 Nothing but obscurity and contradiction, clouds and thick 
 darkness. 
 
 And first, this Matter which has "the promise and potency 
 of all terrestrial life," does it really exist at all ? The leaders 
 of the new philosophy are not agreed, even as to its bare 
 existence. The doctrine of Berkeley, which denies an objective 
 material world, and reduces everything to mental ideas and 
 sensations, has had many disciples down to our own day. 
 Mr. Mill speaks with scorn of those who profess to see in this 
 theory any contradiction of reason and common sense. He 
 adopts it fully, and would baptize all material objects by 
 a new name. They are things no longer, but only " perma- 
 nent possibilities of sensation." But how can feelings and 
 sensations be possible, if there is no thing to be felt, and 
 no person to feel ? The whole universe of thought becomes a 
 multiplied heap of sentences, in which the copula only is left, 
 and both the subject and the object are stolen away. 
 
 Such is the first variety in that sensational creed, which is 
 to replace Christian faith, and belief in the Bible. Mind per- 
 haps may exist, and at least a compromise is proposed. " The 
 wisest thing is to accept the inexplicable fact (of memory) 
 without any theory of how it takes place ; and Avhen Ave speak 
 of it in terms which assume a theory, to use them with a reser- 
 vation as to their meaning. No such difficulties attend the 
 theory in its application to matter." That is, in plainer words, 
 we may speak of minds as existent, reserving a secret doubt
 
 whether they exist or not. But in the case of matter the 
 reserve is needless, and we may safely adopt the theory of its 
 non-existence, as any thing apart from a percipient mind. 
 
 It is the striking remark of Gibbon on the history of Bajazet 
 — " The savage would have devoui-ed his prey, if in the fatal 
 moment he had not been devoured by another savage stronger 
 than himself/^ And here we have a sign that, while Materialism 
 is prophesying its victories, and seeking to engulf both morality 
 and religion within its ravenous jaws. Nihilism, another form 
 of error, is lying in wait for it to destroy it in its turn, 
 and replace it by a negative creed of nothingness and utter 
 darkness. 
 
 Let us turn to Mr. Spencer, and see there another form of 
 the materializing theory. His doctrine may be summed up in 
 two or three principles. First, matter is indestructible, and 
 this indestructibility is an a priori truth, since no demon- 
 stration of it a posteriori is possible. Secondly, matter, as an 
 absolute reality, is some mode of the unknowable, related to 
 the matter we know as cause to effect. Thirdly, phenomenal 
 matter, the relative reality we know, is made up of the pheno- 
 mena or sensations we experience from material objects. 
 
 We are thus involved, a second time, in a hopeless contra- 
 diction. Phenomenal matter is constantly destroyed. The 
 candle burns away and disappears. The gunpowder explodes 
 and vanishes, and the sensations it gave to our touch and sight 
 come to an end. The cloud melts away into the blue sky, and 
 is no more. But non-phenomenal matter, the absolute reality, 
 by the theory is one form of the unknowable. Of this we 
 cannot know, then, whether it can or cannot be destroyed. 
 And still the indestructibility of matter is to be reckoned a 
 fundamental a priori truth. What contradiction can bo more 
 complete? How can we found an all-conquering, all-inclu- 
 sive philosophy on the basis of a palpable contradiction ? 
 
 But this is only the first step in the intei-nal antagonisms oi 
 this material philosophy. First, physicists are not agreed 
 whether matter is to roign alone, or whether there is an ether 
 also, to share its dominion. M. Comte, Justice Grove, and 
 some others, hold the first alternative, but nine-tenths of 
 scientific students adopt the other view. In this, I believe, 
 they are fully justified by the facts of science. But then we 
 have, in this one fact, a barrier which the tide-wave of mate- 
 rialism can never surmount, and though its waves may toss 
 themselves, they can never prevail against it. It is hard and 
 impossible to conceive of millions or trillions of atoms creating 
 themselves. But it is harder and stiU more impossible to 
 
 c
 
 10 
 
 conceive that each of them chooses in the moment of its birth, 
 whether it shall become an atom of matter or one of ether. 
 
 Let us briefly compare our knowledge and ignorance on this 
 question of the nature of matter, so fundamental in the philo- 
 sophy of materiaKsm. We know, first, in spite of Mr. Mill's 
 dissent, that matter does exist, is an objective reality, and no 
 mere possibility of mental sensations. We know, next, in 
 contrast to Mr. Spencer, that some knowledge of its proper- 
 ties is attainable, and that it does not belong to an Absolute 
 Something wholly unknowable. We have strong reason to 
 believe that it is composed of ultimate atoms, whether finite 
 in size, or force-centres and points, whether of various shapes 
 or spheres only. My conviction is that we may know further 
 that the vortex atoms of Helmholtz are impossible figments, 
 and that the hypothesis, instead of being self-consistent, in- 
 volves more than one direct and essential contradiction. But 
 what do we know beside concerning its nature? Almost 
 nothing. We do not know certainly whether these atoms are 
 finite in size, or force-centres, whether various in shape, if 
 finite, or spheres ; whether the chemical elements have atoms 
 essentially distinct, or convertible into each other ; whether or 
 not these atoms have any powers at all, except change of place, 
 attraction and repulsion, or appetency and aversion. In their 
 laws, as detected by science, there is nothing at all which can 
 explain either their number, why they are not fewer or more 
 numerous ; or their position, why they are at such and such 
 distances and in such directions, and not in others ; or their dis- 
 tinctive laws of mutual action, in approaching to or receding 
 from each other. For all these there is and can be no key or 
 reasonable explanation, but in the decree and will of an all- 
 wise Creator, the Supreme Lord and Architect of the material 
 universe. 
 
 III. The Existence and Nature of Ether is a third subject, on 
 which there rests a still greater obscurity. If it really exists, 
 the knowledge of matter and of ether must plainly be the two 
 pillars on which the science of physics must rest. But doubts 
 are greater, and the conflicts of opinion still more various than 
 before. 
 
 And first, does this ether exist ? Such is the general 
 opinion of physical students ; and for myself, I have no doubt 
 ot" its truth. But the dissentients are not few. M. Comte 
 denounces the theory as an equal illusion with the vortices of 
 Descartes. Mr. Lewes, his disciple, shares the same view. 
 Mr. Mill, in his Logic, inclines to the same side. The hypo- 
 thesis, he says, is not without an analogy to that of Descartes,
 
 11 
 
 only that " it is not entirely cvit off from tlie possibility of 
 direct evidence in its favour/^ He has the strange idea that 
 there can be some evidence of an hypothesis, besides that of 
 accounting for the phenomena it has to explain. Mr. Justice 
 Grove^ in his " Correlation and Continuity," holds strongly to 
 the negative view. But the idea that the immensely diluted 
 and attenuated matter of the planetary spaces can have the 
 intense elasticity implied by the speed of light seems to me 
 wholly incredible. 
 
 Next, if ether exists, is it of one kind only, or more than 
 one ? By way of compensation to the last opinion, some 
 theorists affirm that there are two kinds of ether, one called 
 electric, the other luminous. Others go further. The authors 
 of the Unseen Universe seem disposed to suggest a series of 
 ethers, more and more subtile, of which the second may have 
 nearly the same relation to the first which the first bears to 
 common matter. This is very like a reproduction of the 
 ceons and genealogies of the early Gnostics in a physical and 
 material form. 
 
 Again, is the ether continuous, or discontinuous and atomic ? 
 Professor Challis holds strongly the former, but Newton, 
 Young, Fresnel, Airy, Cauchy, Stokes, and most other physical 
 philosophers, the latter view. 
 
 Is this ether attractive or self-repulsive ? The latter, the 
 usual opinion, seems to me essential to a just conception of its 
 nature. But Professor Bayma, in his Molecular Physics, main- 
 tains that it must be attractive. And Sir George Airy, in 
 private, once told me that, in his opinion, the phenomena of 
 light required the notion of attractive or contractile forces, and 
 stretched strings, rather than repulsive force-centres, though 
 this must imply some kind of fastening or attachment to walls 
 of the universe. 
 
 Again, what is the relation between ether and common 
 matter ? Newton suggests that ether is denser outside of 
 solids, and less dense within them. This would imply that they 
 exert on each other a repulsive power. But Mosotti, Norton, 
 and most other modern theorists, make the mutual action 
 attractive, so that it would be denser within bodies, and at 
 their surface, than in free space. 
 
 Once more, if the ether is self-repulsive, and intensely 
 elastic, how is this elasticity maintained ? Must it not diSuse 
 itself into empty space ? Or are we to conceive the universe 
 bounded by a solid wall, able to resist an almost infinite pres- 
 sure ? Sir John Herschel has remarked : " Under no concep- 
 tion but that of a solid can an elastic and expansible medium
 
 12 
 
 be self-contained. If free to expand, it would require a bound- 
 ing envelope of sufficient strength to resist its outward pres- 
 sure. To evade this by supposing it infinite in extent, is to 
 meet the difficulty by words without ideas, and to take refuge 
 in a negation of that which constitutes the difficulty." 
 
 Thus, from Newton to the present day, all these various 
 doctrines about ether have been held by men of eminence ; 
 that there is no such ether distinct from matter, that there are 
 two kinds, or many, each rarer than the one before it, or one 
 kind alone ; that it is a solid and a fluid, attractive and repul- 
 sive, a continuous plenum, or made up of discontinuous atoms ; 
 that these are solid and finite, or points and force-centres only ; 
 that it is attracted by matter, that it is repelled by it, and that 
 it is neither attracted nor repelled, but merely is shut out 
 from the space this occupies ; that it is finite in extent, and 
 that is infinite, a repulsive variety of material substance, or a 
 bridge between the visible worlds and an unseen universe. 
 
 Physical science, with regard to the nature of matter and 
 ether, its two constituent elements, is thus in its merest 
 childhood. It has yet to decide which is true out of a dozen 
 or a score of rival theories. Its teachers, then, and still 
 more its disciples, will do wisely to assume a far more modest 
 tone in dealing with moral and religious questions than 
 has been their practice of late years. It is ridiculous for 
 those to declaim on the diversity of religious creeds, and the 
 controversies and strifes of theologians, who can hardly agree 
 in laying a single stone in the foundations of their own philo- 
 sophical system. 
 
 IV. The Conservation of Energy, the Doctrine of Evolution, 
 and the Nebular Theory, are so closely related that it will be 
 better to examine them together. The great divergence among 
 scientific theorists, and the large amount of what is doubtful 
 or untrue in their reasonings will thus be seen in a clearer 
 light. Has there been really that almost infinite progress, of 
 which Dr. Tyndall speaks, beyond Newton and Leibnitz and 
 the students of last century ? Have the present generation 
 of physical students, by virtue of these doctrines, a far deeper 
 insight into the true system of nature than their predecessors 
 could ever attain ? This, I believe, is a grand illusion, fraught 
 with no small degree of moral mischief. Analysts have made 
 some real advance in dealing with various dynamical problems. 
 Observation and experiment have unfolded more clearly the 
 connection between diverse forms of physical change, usually 
 expressed by different names. But along with this advance
 
 13 
 
 there is great danger, what with the coinage of new phrases 
 for old ideas, and free scientific guess-work, of going backward 
 instead of forward. Already, in more cases than one, mere 
 verbiage, or even direct contradictions, have been palmed 
 on the credulous as grand experimental discoveries, or still 
 more grand a priori truths. 
 
 What, then, is this Energy, about which such great dis- 
 coveries have been made ? Few of those who speak or write 
 about it seem to have settled clearly what they mean by the 
 term. Is it force or motion ? Is it both or is it neither, being 
 something quite distinct from both ? All these four opinions 
 seem to be held, and by writers of some eminence. According 
 to Mr. Spencer, it is force, and the better name for the con- 
 servation of energy is the persistence of force. According 
 to Mr. Grove it is motion, and the various forms of energy 
 are " modes of motion.^' According to Professors Thomson 
 and Tait, who understand the subject better, it is both, or 
 rather each in turn. It has two kinds, potential and kinetic. 
 The first is an integral of forces, such as have acted or will 
 act, when a system passes from a first to a second position. 
 Kinetic energy is an integral of velocities or motions, or their 
 total amounts from zero up to their actual values at any given 
 time. These are three varieties, that it is force, motion, or 
 partly one, partly the other. Mr. Brooke adds a fourth 
 variety, that it is neither force nor motion, but a third some- 
 thing, distinct from both. While he distinguishes it from 
 force, he also inverts the use of the two terms. His Energy is 
 exactly the same as the Force of Newton^s definition, and of 
 nearly every work on dynamics; while his Force is the 
 Potential Energy of Sir W. Thomson's analytical theory. 
 
 According to Mr. Spencer, the Conservation of Energy, or 
 as he prefers to call it, the Persistence of Force, is the chief 
 and foremost of all a 'priori truths. It holds in his philo- 
 sophy exactly the same place as the Being of God in the 
 Christian system. It transcends both demonstration and ex- 
 perience, and is the widest and deepest of all truths. But no 
 sooner has this doctrine, borrowed from the analysts, been 
 adopted by Agnostic metaphysicians, and raised to an in- 
 tellectual throne, as a substitute for the living, personal 
 God of the Bible, than it is confronted by a rival, a younger 
 son of the same parents, the Dissipation of Energy. It is 
 the same analysts, from whom the first doctrine has been 
 borrowed, who are the sponsors of this rival and suc- 
 cessor. Like the giant in the Hindoo tale, the new divinity
 
 14 
 
 of fatalism places its hand on its own head, and in a 
 moment is reduced to ashes. I will give three statements 
 of this second doctrine from Professor B. Stewart^s Conser- 
 vation of Energy, Thomson & Tait's Natural Philosophy, and 
 the recent work. The Unseen Universe. The first writes as 
 follows : — 
 
 "Although in a strictly mechanical sense there is a conserva- 
 tion of energy, as regards use or fitness for living things, 
 the energy of the universe is in process of deterioration. 
 Difi'used heat forms what we may call the great waste-heap of 
 the universe, and this is growing larger every day. We have 
 regarded the universe, not as a collection of matter, but an 
 energetic agent, a lamp. Looked at in this light, it is a 
 system that had a beginning, and must have an end; for a 
 process of degradation cannot be eternal. If we regard it as 
 a candle that has been lit, we become absolutely certain that it 
 cannot have been burning from eternity, and that a time will 
 come when it will cease to burn.''^ 
 
 Sir W. Thomson writes thus in his joint treatise, with 
 Professor Tait, on Natural Philosophy. *' It is quite certain 
 that the solar system cannot have gone on, as at present, for a 
 few hundred thousand or a million years, without the irrevo- 
 cable loss, by dissipation, not annihilation, of a considerable 
 portion of the entire energy, initially in store for sun heat 
 and Plutonic action. It is quite certain that the whole store 
 of energy in the solar system has been greater in all past time 
 than at present. It is probable that the secular rate of dissipa- 
 tion has been in some direct proportion to the total amount of 
 energy at any time after the commencement of the present 
 order of things, and has thus been diminishing from age to 
 age .... Hypotheses assuming equability of sun and storm 
 for a million years cannot be wholly true .... I think we 
 may say, with much probability that the consoKdation of the 
 earth's crust cannot have taken place less than twenty, nor 
 more than 400 million years ago. I conclude that Leibnitz's 
 epoch of the ^ consistentior status' was probably between 
 these dates," {N.P. pp. 712-716). 
 
 We read also in The Unseen Universe as follows, p. 91 : — 
 '' Heat is the communist of our universe, and will no doubt 
 bring the system to an end. The sun is the furnace, or som*ce 
 of high-temperature heat to our system, as the stars to other 
 systems. The energy essential to our existence is derived 
 from the heat the sun radiates, and represents a very small 
 part of it. But while the sun supplies us with energy, he
 
 15 
 
 himself is getting colder, and must ultimately, by radiation 
 into space, part with the Hfe-sustaining power he now possesses. 
 In each case of collision, there will be the conversion of visible 
 energy into heat and a partial and temporary restoration of 
 the power of the sun. At length, however, the process will 
 have come to an end, and he will be extinguished ; until, after 
 long ages, his black mass is brought into contact with that of 
 his nearest neighbour.^'" 
 
 The idea is then pursued further, as follows : — 
 
 '^ After unimaginable ages these two stars, the Sun and 
 Sirius, having each long since devoured his attendants, and 
 exhausted their heat energy by radiation into space, may be 
 imagined travelling towards each other with accelerated motion. 
 They will at last approach each other with great velocity, and 
 finally form one system. The two will rush together and form 
 one mass, the orbital energy being converted into heat, and 
 the matter probably evaporated and changed into a gaseous, 
 nebulous condition. Ages pass away, and the large double 
 mass ultimately shares the same fate that long since overtook 
 the single masses that compose it. It gives out its light and 
 heat into space, and becomes dark, until it comes to form one 
 of the constituents of a still more stupendous collision. By 
 a process of this kind the primordial potential energy is 
 gradually converted into light and heat, and then ultimately 
 dissipated into space. ^' 
 
 Such is the doctrine of the Dissipation of Energy, as held 
 by the three eminent physicists and mathematicians. Professors 
 Sir W. Thomson, Tait, and Balfour Stewart. Mr. Spencer, 
 again, has seven chapters on the kindred subject of Evolution, 
 and defines it in these words : — " A change from incoherent 
 homogeneity to coherent heterogeneity, accompanying the dis- 
 sipation of motion, and the integration of matter." This is 
 plainly, in abstract terms, the same process just described, 
 by which suns, with their planets, are formed out of nebula, 
 then the planets fall into the suns, and the suns in long succes- 
 sion into each other. A strange inversion of the natural 
 meaning of the word, evolution, when it is made to denote the 
 tendency of an expanded nebula to roll itself up into one 
 mighty central mass ! 
 
 Let us now take Professor HaeckePs account of the nebular, 
 or as he calls it, Kant's cosmological gas theory. It reads as 
 follows : — 
 
 " Kant's cosmogeny maintains that the whole universe, in- 
 conceivable ages ago, consisted of a gaseous chaos. All the
 
 16 
 
 substances found at present deposited on the earth, and other 
 bodies, originally constituted one single homogeneous mass, 
 equally filling up the space of the universe, which, in con- 
 sequence of an extremely high degree of temperature, was in 
 an exceedingly thin gaseous or nebulous state. The millions 
 of bodies which at present form the different solar systems 
 did not then exist. They originated in consequence of a 
 universal rotation, during which a number of masses acquired 
 a greater density than the remaining mass, and these acted as 
 central points of attraction. There arose a separation of the 
 primary nebula into a number of rotating nebulous spheres. 
 While the centripetal force attracted the rotating particles 
 nearer e.nd nearer to the central point of the nucleus, the 
 centrifugal force always tended to separate the peripheral par- 
 ticles farther from it As these simple processes repeated 
 
 themselves over and over again, there arose the different solar 
 systems, the planets revolving round their suns, and the 
 satellites, or moons, round the planets." 
 
 Such is the outline given of Kant's, more usually called 
 Laplace's, theory. The merit is claimed for it that it is " purely 
 monistic, and entirely excludes every supernatural process, 
 and pre-arranged and conscious action of a personal Creator." 
 But its high excellence as an atheistic theory is not without 
 its shadow. Some weak points. Professor Haeckel observes, 
 still remain, which prevent our placing in it unconditional 
 confidence, and these are stated as follows : — 
 
 " The theory furnishes no starting-point at all in explana- 
 tion of the impulse which caused the first rotary motion in the 
 gas-filled universe. In seeking for such an impulse, we are 
 involuntarily led to think of a first beginning. But we can as 
 little imagine a first beginning of the motion of the universe 
 as of its final end. The universe is unlimited and immeasur- 
 able, both in space and time. It is eternal, and it is infinite. 
 Nor can we imagine a beginning or an end to the etei'nal 
 motion, in which all the particles of matter are always engaged. 
 The great laws of the conservation of force and of matter 
 admit of no other supposition. The universe is a connected 
 chain of phenomena of motion, necessitating a continual 
 change of form. Every form as a temporary result is pei'ish- 
 able, and of limited duration ; but in this change matter 
 and the motion inseparable from it remain eternal and 
 indestructible." 
 
 The Nebular Theory, then, as understood by Professor 
 Haeokel, implies that matter is infinite both in quantity and
 
 17 
 
 in its past duration ; that it has been in motion from all eternity, 
 and can never rest ; that the universe has no beginning and 
 no end ; that this view is required by those grand discoveries 
 of modern physics, the conservation of matter and of force ; 
 that the nebula, vast ages ago, was intensely hot, and lias 
 since gradually grown cooler, while severing into distinct 
 masses, and acquiring a rotatory motion. 
 
 All these principles are exactly reversed by the authors 
 of the Unseen Universe, who are first-class mathematicians. 
 They hold, as the result of the dissipation of energy, that 
 the universe had a beginning, and must have an end ; that 
 it is like a candle which has some time been lighted, and 
 cannot burn on for ever ; that this doctrine, instead of being 
 opposed to the conservation of force and matter, is the natural 
 sequel and complement of those theories ; and finally, that 
 all the heat of the sun and stars, instead of being due to the 
 high temperature of the nebula, is wholly the creation and 
 result of its latter condensation. So (p. 125) we read that " as 
 the particles condensed or came together, the potential energy 
 was gradually transmuted into the energy of heat and of 
 visible motion." 
 
 In Mr. Spencer we meet with a third form of the Nebular 
 Theory, and Physical Evolution. The theism of the authors 
 of the Unseen Universe, who afiirm a beginning and an end, 
 and the monism or atheism of Professor Haeckel, which 
 wholly denies both, is pronounced alike unphilosophical. That 
 question belongs to the class of which nothing can be known. 
 For the rest, he holds the indestructibility of force, and the 
 continuity or eternity of motion, as a great a priori truth. 
 But he holds, side by side with it, the Dissipation of Energy, 
 or a process " which must go on bringing things ever nearer 
 to complete rest.*' If equilibration, he asks, must end in 
 complete rest, what is the fiite towards which all things tend ? 
 " If the sun is losing its force at a rate which must tell in 
 millions of years, and men and society are dependent on a 
 supply that is gradually coming to an end, are we not 
 manifestly progressing towards omnipresent death ? That 
 such a state must be the outcome of the processes everywhere 
 going on seems beyond a doubt.*' But a further suggestion 
 is made, that, when the last collision of suns and systems 
 occurs, there must ensue a diffusion that undoes tlie previous 
 concentration. So that a period, inconceivably vast, of evolu- 
 tion, that is, condensation, may be followed by a paroxysm of 
 dissolution, that is, of re-expansion into nebula once more. 
 
 ])
 
 18 
 
 Thus the mighty pendulum of the universe may swing on 
 backwards and forwards for ever. 
 
 Now on these three forms of the nebular theory^ linked 
 closely with the doctrine of evolution, and the conservation 
 of energy, two questions must arise. Do these witnesses 
 agree ? Ai'e they not in plain contradiction to each other ? 
 And next, are they, where they agree, certain truths of 
 science, or imperfect and perhaps erroneous conjectures, 
 on subjects where all the data are not at present certainly 
 known ? Has this doctrine of an incessant, purposeless oscil- 
 lation from nebulous mist to suns and starry systems, and 
 from these back to mist again, dark, dreary, and hopeless, on 
 its moral side, any claim whatever to be reckoned a true and 
 just exposition of the known laws of physical change ? I 
 believe firmly the exact reverse. I hold it to be as baseless 
 in physics as it is full of darkness and gloom to all the deeper 
 wants and aspirations of the human heart. It degrades that 
 inscrutable Power which it refuses to name, and of which it 
 affirms that we can know nothing, into a drivelling idiot, 
 engaged for ever "in dropping buckets into empty wells, 
 and growing old in drawing nothing up ''; who goes on, like a 
 convict under his sentence, turning for ever and ever, to no 
 profit, the vast tread-wheel of the universe. 
 
 I pass by the question of beginning or no beginning, in 
 which the author of The Natural History of Creation con- 
 tradicts flatly, not only the very first word of Divine Eevela- 
 tion, but the clear voice of sound reason. Be it so, that 
 matter is unlimited in quantity, and in past duration. What 
 result must follow ? The doctrines of the conservation of 
 force and matter, instead of being confirmed, will be turned 
 into unmeaning sounds. For the essence of these laws is that 
 the amount of matter or force is always the same. But there 
 can be no measurement of that which is infinite and un- 
 measurable. If the laws are true, the quantity of matter 
 must be finite, and the quantity of energy must be finite and 
 measurable also. 
 
 Again, if motion is essential to matter, and it has always 
 been moving, the logical ground of the nebular theory is 
 destroyed. Motion is the effect of force. In the present 
 state of things forces and motions co-exist. A simpler state, 
 then, would be one in which there are forces tending to 
 produce motion, but no actual movement. If all motion is 
 due to a past exercise of force, we must go back in thought 
 to a time when there were no motions, but forces only. This 
 is the true ground of reason for a nebular theory. Such a
 
 19 
 
 state must certainly liave been one of wide diffusion of matter, 
 as well as of perfect rest. But if matter has been in motion 
 from all eternity, no one stage of this incessant change can be 
 more simple than another. There would, then, be no reason 
 for accepting a primitive nebula, unless we could prove by 
 strict reasoning that such was actually the state of things long 
 ago. That attractive forces, beginning from a state of rest, 
 would lead to rotatory motion, such as those we observe in 
 the heavens, is the only real basis of any nebular theory. 
 
 Next, the assumption that the first state of the nebula was 
 one of intense heat is flatly opposed to the real principles of 
 modern science. It belongs to the exploded hypothesis that 
 caloric is a distinct substance, and not merely atomic motion. 
 The universe, in a state of extreme diffusion, would resemble 
 the highest and rarest parts of our atmosphere, and only be 
 much rarer still. The feature of those regions is not intense 
 heat but extreme cold. The true conception of the primitive ne- 
 bula is that of a system at perfect rest, but with forces that 
 can generate motion. Now heat is really atomic motion, 
 and hence the primitive temperature must have been an 
 absolute zero of cold. Such, accordingly, is the doctrine laid 
 down in the Unseen Universe, that heat results from potential 
 energy transformed in the process of condensation. 
 
 Every single point in this atheistic nebular theory involves 
 a direct logical contradiction. First, if the universe be full of 
 matter, there could be no motion, for no mass or particle could 
 find any unoccupied place into which to move. There could 
 be no attractive force, for how could parts draw nearer to each 
 other, when every spot between was perfectly full ? There 
 could be no rotation in a homogeneous mass, since there will 
 be just as much reason for turning one way as another. There 
 could have been no primitive heat, since heat is motion, and 
 there could be no change of place in a plenum, when no 
 particle has any place not already filled, into which it could 
 remove. There could be no condensation for the same reason. 
 
 The nebular theory, in its only reasonable form, requires 
 these postulates ; a system of material atoms, finite, however 
 vast, and therefore capable alike of motion and of increase ; a 
 beginning, that is, a primitive state of perfect rest, in which 
 there are forces, but no motion, and therefore not a high tem- 
 perature, but a perfect zero of cold ; a finite past duration, 
 since if we went further back, the later motions must reappear, 
 only with their directions reversed, and the whole ground of 
 the theory would be swept away. And above all, we need a 
 Creative Will, to determine the number and the place of all
 
 20 
 
 the atoms, and the laws of attraction and repulsion that must 
 guide and determine all their later movements. For the 
 grand aphorism of Newton must remain for ever firm and sure, 
 however sciolists strive against it. " Blind necessity, which is 
 always the same everywhere, could never produce this beauti- 
 ful variety of things.^' 
 
 It is folly to derive a state of motion from one of rest, if 
 motion has been eternal, or to describe an original state, if 
 there never was an origin. The nebular theory, in the hands 
 of the atheist, shares the fate of the corpse of Priam — 
 
 Jacet iugens litore truncus, 
 Avulsiiraque humeris caput, et sine nomine corpus. 
 
 Evolution, again, in Mr. Spencer's work, is onl}' an obscure 
 synonym for the process of cooling. A heated body contracts 
 and condenses when it cools, and this, in more learned phrase, 
 is the integration of matter. It parts with some of its heat to 
 the cooler bodies around it, and this is the dissipation of 
 motion. Incoherent gases, by cooling, become imperfectly 
 coherent fluids; and these, when cooled further, coherent 
 solids. A sea of aqueous vapour, or a bowl of water, to sense, 
 is wholly homogeneous ; but ice-crystals are more or less 
 sensibly heterogeneous. Thus mere cooling combines all the 
 characters of evolution in Mr. Spencer's definition. 
 
 But can this be really the grand secret of nature, the key 
 to a new and improved system of physical science ? Is this 
 the discovery which is to throw that of Newton into the shade, 
 and absorb into itself all mental philosophy and Christian 
 faith ? A primitive nebula, intensely heated at first, has gone 
 on cooling for almost infinite ages ! If true, this would be 
 grotesquely inadequate as a theory of all physical change. For 
 this demands, not loose phrases or metaphysical verbiage, 
 but distinct laws of force, like the law of gra%dtation ; and of 
 these the theory offers no trace. But it is not true. It is 
 rather the direct opposite of the ti'uth. The pi'imitive nebula, 
 on the only hypothesis which gives us a right to assume its ex- 
 istence at all, cannot have been intensely hot, but at an absolute 
 zero of cold. Heat is atomic motion. And all motion, in a true 
 nebular theory, can only result from attractive forces in a 
 nebula at rest, and its later condensation. The cooling, which 
 Mr. Spencer mistakes for the whole process, and calls evolu- 
 tion, is only a secondary result of the condensation, or the 
 heating process which directly results from attractive forces, 
 and which must have gone before. Evolution is not simple
 
 21 
 
 cooling. Heating by attraction and pressure, and later cooling 
 of the central parts of each mass by transfer of motion towards 
 the surface, are successive stages in the progressive develop- 
 ment of cosmical change. 
 
 V. Modern theories of Solar Heat, and the Dissipation of 
 Energy, are the next doctrines that I shall briefly examine. 
 Two main views on the former have been lately proposed. 
 The first is that of Mayer, accepted for a time by Sir W. 
 Thomson, but since abandoned. It assumes that the sun is 
 hammered into a white heat by the continued impact of falling 
 meteors. But this view belongs now to a past lunation of 
 science. The present favourite is the doctrine developed by 
 Helmholtz, adopted by Sir W. Thomson, and embodied by 
 Mr. Spencer among the latest improvements of his own system. 
 He writes of it in these words : — 
 
 '^ Professor Helmholtz estimates that since the time when 
 the matter of the solar system extended to the orbit of Nep- 
 tune, there has been evolved 454 times the amount of heat 
 which the sun has yet in store. He makes an approximate 
 estimate of the rate at which the remainder is being diffused, 
 showing that a diminution of his diameter by one ten-thou- 
 sandth would produce heat at the present rate for two thousand 
 years ; and that thus, at the present rate, his diameter would 
 diminish one-twentieth in the next million years No uncer- 
 tainty in the data, and consequent error in the inferred rate at 
 which the sun expends his reserve of force, militates against 
 the proposition that this reserve of force '^".s- being expended, and 
 must in time be exhausted." 
 
 This same doctrine, of the ceaseless dissipation of the solar 
 energy, and indeed of that of the whole universe, is also 
 expounded by Professor Stewart in these words : — 
 
 *' While you with the greatest ease transform work into heat, 
 you can by no method in your power transform all the heat 
 back into work. The process is not a recoverable one. The 
 consequence is that the mechanical energy of the universe is 
 every day more and more changed into heat. Now, if this 
 process goes on, and always in one direction, there can be no 
 doubt about the issue. The mechanical energy of the universe 
 will be more and more transformed into universally-diffused 
 heat, until the universe will no longer be a fit abode for living 
 things. The conclusion is a startling one. We are led to 
 look to a beginning, in which the particles of matter were in 
 a diffuse, chaotic state, but endowed with the power of gravi- 
 tation; and to an end, in which the whole universe will be 
 one equally-heated, inert mass, from which everything like life, 
 motion, and beauty will have utterly gone away."
 
 22 
 
 Here two questions arise. Is this new doctrine of the 
 ceaseless dissipation of energy true and sound? Is either 
 theory of solar heat^ which has been connected with it, a 
 settled fact of science, or a guess in the dark, against which 
 there are strong and decisive reasons ? In spite of the great 
 names which have espoused this theory, I believe that its 
 baselessness admits of strict demonstration. Its true place 
 is not even among the uncertainties, but the mistakes and 
 errors of science. 
 
 And, first, how can the conservation of energy and its cease- 
 less dissipation agree together ? If the total amount is always 
 the same, it cannot undergo a process of constant diminution. 
 The reply is, that it is not annihilated, but goes oflF into infinite 
 space. This is plainly impossible in any other sense than that 
 the universe expands without limit. There can be no energy 
 anywhere, without matter or ether to which it belongs. 
 Abstract qualities cannot exist alone. There can be no kinetic 
 energy or motion without something that moves. There can 
 be no potential energy, a function of distances, without par- 
 ticles or masses to which these distances appertain. The only 
 reasonable sense of the phrase, dissipation of energy, is that 
 the system occupies a wider space than before. But perhaps 
 the outmost parts, in receding, cease to have any practical 
 connection with all the rest. This is just as impossible as an 
 absolute loss. The law of gravitation alone forbids it, and 
 links every part of matter indissolubly with all the rest. 
 
 Again, the radiant heat and light, which cause the dissipa- 
 tion, are only one part of the total result of a previous con- 
 densation. This is the very essence of the nebular theory. 
 That this heat and light should cause a dissipation or expan- 
 sion of the system far beyond the original bulk or space of the 
 primitive nebula is really the doctrine that part of a thing may 
 be greater than the whole. 
 
 Next, what can become of the lost energy ? Professor 
 Stewart makes answer : " We can only reply that, as far as we 
 can judge from our present knowledge, the radiant energy not 
 absorbed must be traversing space at the rate of 188,000 miles 
 a second." 
 
 Now what does this answer imply ? The ether is conceived 
 to extend far beyond the system of which it is an essential 
 part, and that with unabated elasticity. If there is no restraint 
 at the boundary, it must have gone on expanding, from the 
 date of the first nebula, through countless ages. However 
 great the original elasticity, it must have become insensible in 
 amount millions of years ago. The first word in a true record
 
 23 
 
 of man's creation, in this view, would not and could not be — 
 Let there be light ! but rather, Let there be eternal stagnation 
 and midnight darkness. 
 
 To account for the high elasticity of the ether, after ages 
 have passed, we must either assume a solid limit or boundary 
 of the stellar universe, such as Milton describes, or else that 
 the ether thins and is less elastic at the outside, like the 
 highest strata of the earth's atmosphere, till its repulsion is 
 balanced by its affinity for the matter which adjoins it. In 
 either case there could be no dissipation of energy. It would 
 be restored either by rebound from the solid wall of the system, 
 or, on the other view, by change into potential energy at the 
 elastic boundary of the universe. 
 
 But the energy, though its amount be unchanged, may per- 
 haps become degraded and inferior in kind. Working energy 
 may grow idle and worthless. As unequal temperature, it can 
 do much work. As equalized temperature, its working power 
 is gone. The great waste-heap goes on accumulating, as 
 posterity may learn some day to their cost. The universe will 
 then become " an equally-heated, inert mass, from which all 
 life, motion, and beauty have utterly gone away." 
 
 Heat is atomic motion. Equal diffusion of heat cannot, then, 
 be the same with absolute rest. If the heat of our solar system 
 were shared equally among the sun, planets, and satellites, we 
 should not be frozen to death with absolute cold. On the 
 contrary, we should plainly be burned up with a fiery confla- 
 gration. The temperature of our globe would become much 
 higher than the heat of melted iron. 
 
 In the view of science energy is only of two kinds. The 
 nebular theory implies that it was once mainly potential, or the 
 energy of distance, and that motion, the other kind of energy, 
 has replaced the first, as the nebula condensed. The effect is 
 surely not more noble than the cause, the child than its parent. 
 If one part of the motion engendered, that is, the heat, is 
 retransformed into the other kind, the change can be no degra- 
 dation. The working power cannot be lost. It is rather re- 
 stored, and only passes beyond our human control. It provides 
 for a renewal of work in some other form. Even in our farms, 
 manure and sewage are utilized, and turned into sources of 
 increased fertility. Man's range of power is limited, and our 
 great sewage problem is still unsolved. But the powers of 
 nature have a far wider range. In spite of desponding theories, 
 we may be perfectly sure that there is no real waste-heap in 
 God's glorious universe. 
 
 The main fault of the doctrine lies here. Matter and ether
 
 24 
 
 need three laws to determine their mutual action. The action 
 of matter on matter is known, the law of gravitation. Out of 
 this law, applied to a vast, diffused, finite system of matter, 
 the nebular theory has grown. It accounts, by the working of 
 that law on such a nebula, for many leading phenomena of our 
 solar system. The action, again, of ether on ether, though its 
 law is not known, must be self-repulsive, in order to explain its 
 nearly equal diffusion. If it condensed into patches, the trans- 
 mission of light would cease. Out of this law grows the 
 doctrine of dissipation. Heat, or atomic motion, if impressed on 
 the ether, must be transmitted in all directions with the speed 
 of light. The limit to which this action tends is complete 
 equality. Hot bodies must grow cool, and cool bodies be 
 heated, till the balance is restored. But in this reasoning the 
 third law, also unknown, but certainly attractive, the mutual 
 action of matter and ether, is left out of sight and forgotten. 
 Yet it is one most essential element in the problem. Without 
 some law of this kind, the atomic heat could not afi'ect the 
 ambient ether at all, and there could be no radiation. 
 
 The doctrine that the total amount of heat never changes, 
 and that its transmission is in proportion to difference of tem- 
 perature, cannot be absolutely true. It is only a relic of 
 the now exploded theory, that caloric is a distinct and peculiar 
 substance. 
 
 When light and heat travel from an incandescent body 
 through space, the most palpable result is to heat the solid 
 bodies within its range. So far there is a simple transfer of 
 heat, and nearly in the ratio of the excess of temperature. But 
 is this the sole eflFect? Does no part exercise a repellent 
 powei", and become reconverted into increased distance or dila- 
 tation? The answer should have been plain to the eye of science 
 from the first. Within a few months it has received a striking 
 experimental confirmation. What means the rotation of the 
 blackened discs in that new-invented instrument, the radio- 
 meter ? Clearly, that one effect of radiant heat and light is 
 direct repulsion, by which the bodies on which it falls must 
 be di'iven a little further from the source of that radiation. 
 
 This is not the whole truth. Clouds, it is known, tend to 
 disappear under the light of the full moon. So it is clear that 
 some part of the energy in the sun's light and heat will be 
 spent in rarefying any nebulous patches, thicker than the rest, 
 in the thin and rare matter of the planetary spaces through 
 which it travels. 
 
 Again, by the laws of mechanics, some part, and perhaps 
 the main part, must be spent in creating ethereal currents.
 
 25 
 
 Disturbed ether must have a greater mutual repulsion than 
 ether undisturbed. The motion, in mechanical effect, will be 
 equivalent to an increased density. That the repulsive action 
 may be equal everywhere, the ether must be thinned where the 
 disturbance is greatest, and become denser in all other parts 
 of the system. 
 
 These three changes limit and modify the doctrine of the 
 equal diffusion of heat, and should have been clear to students 
 of physics, as soon as the Baconian view of heat was reesta- 
 blished. I have held them myself for forty years, and expressed 
 them at the close of my work on Matter and Ether, published 
 fourteen years ago. One of them has now, within a few 
 months, been made beautifully patent to the senses of all men. 
 They disprove that doctrine of the ceaseless dissipation of 
 energy, which we find in so many recent works of science, and 
 replace it by a doctrine essentially different, its ceaseless 
 circulation. 
 
 The view of Mayer, that solar heat is kept up mainly by the 
 dropping in of meteors, is now abandoned by its late adhe- 
 rents. It has died an early death. The suggested cause is 
 too irregular, fitful, and uncertain, to account for the grand 
 fact of ceaseless solar radiation. And there is^this further objec- 
 tion, that the consequent increase of the central mass must 
 have shortened the year by one or two hours in the course of 
 the last four thousand years. 
 
 The theory of Helmholtz is now in vogue, which would 
 supply the constant waste in radiation from the further con- 
 traction of the solar mass, and not its increase. But this, I 
 believe, admits of almost as plain a disproof as the other. For 
 what result must follow ? The heat and light would then be 
 greatest vfhen the contraction is most rapid, that is, in the 
 earliest stages of condensation. But all the known facts and 
 known analogies point the opposite way. The more nebulous 
 a star, the smaller and dimmer its light. The most luminous, 
 like Sirius, are those which appear to have most distinctly a 
 fully-condensed central body, like our sun. If the radiant 
 energy were lost in the depths of space as soon as generated, 
 how could the light and heat of the sun have ever reached their 
 present amount ? 
 
 The true key to the problem will be found, I beheve, in a 
 strict application of dynamical reasoning to a vast dual system 
 of matter and ether. It is confirmed by the double analogy of 
 air and ocean currents on the surface of our globe. Radiant 
 light and heat cannot be lost. If part travels out to other 
 systems, the celestial exchanges cannot be all on one side. Our 
 
 E
 
 26 
 
 imports must surely balance, or nearly balance our exports. A 
 small part only is arrested by tlie planets and satellites, and 
 supplies their light and heat. A smaller portion may bo 
 spent in repelling them from the sun, so as to counteract 
 the effect of resistance, or in dilating nebulous matter in the 
 equatorial zone of our system. But the main part, travelling 
 out as ethereal motion, will transform itself at every step 
 of the vast journey into ethereal condensation. There must 
 plainly be an excess of motion in the parts of our system border- 
 ing on the ecliptic and the sun's equatorial plane. There the 
 ether must be thinned. As the heated water of the tropics 
 flows north and south on the surface, and returns condensed 
 and cooled in an undercurrent to the tropics again, so in this 
 vaster and wider system. Towards the outmost planets, and 
 even beyond them, the ether must move in a steady, invisible 
 current to the polar regions of the great celestial sphere, which 
 are not disturbed by the immense rotatory action of the cen- 
 tral mass. It will retura to the sun, not as light and heat, 
 but as ethereal compression, in the latent energy arising from 
 an excess of density, and will then by the rotation be trans- 
 formed into sensible light and heat once more. Such a circuit 
 results demonstrably from the laws of physics, even so far as 
 they are actually known. It answers to the double analogy in 
 the currents of the air and the ocean. Instead of a waste-heap 
 growing larger and larger, till all life, motion, and beauty are 
 buried under the vast accumulation of a motion that will not 
 move, and energy that lies idle and powerless, it reveals a grand 
 scheme of circulation, akin to the systole and diastole of the 
 human heart. The sun might thus without a miracle dispense 
 light and heat, undiminished, and perhaps even increased by 
 further condensation, for millions of years or ages still to come. 
 VI. Again, the doctrine that the earth consisted of a thin 
 crust, formed by cooling on the surface of a sphere liquid 
 with heat, was long accepted as an axiom of physics, and was 
 current in all scientific manuals. A rude shock was first 
 given to it by some papers of Mr. Hopkins, in which he 
 showed that the phenomena of nutation required this solid 
 crust to have at least the thickness of many hundred miles. 
 And now its reversal and rejection have become more complete. 
 The earth's rigidity has been submitted to mathematical 
 analysis by Sir W. Thomson. And he writes that this 
 investigation ^' suffices to disprove the hypothesis, hitherto so 
 prevalent, that we live on a mere shell of solid substance, 
 enclosing a fluid mass of melted rocks or metals ; and proves 
 that the earth, as a whole, is much more rigid than any of the
 
 27 
 
 rocks wliicli constitute its upper crust." Thus a scientific 
 doctrine, not long ago received as a certain truth, has been 
 entirely reversed and set aside by the further progi-ess of 
 science. 
 
 Another theory lately advanced is doomed, I suspect, to a 
 similar fate. I mean the view first propounded, I think, lay 
 Mr. Croll, .ind adopted by Mr. Geikie in his Great Ice Age, 
 and many others, that the supposed long ice-period of geo- 
 logists can be explained by the changes in the earth's eccen- 
 tricity. This would amount, by his calculation, to 10|- 
 millions of miles, about 210,000 years ago. Now the pre- 
 cession of the equinoxes, once in twenty thousand years, will 
 place the winter solstice of the northern hemisphere in the 
 aphelion. The combined effect of the two causes, when the 
 winter half of the year was so much longer, exceeding the 
 summer half more than fifty days, is thought enough to 
 explain a long ice-period in the northern hemisphere. 
 
 But in this hypothesis almost everything is precarious and 
 uncertain. It is doubtful whether we can at all depend on the 
 calculations of the past amount of the eccentricity. Elements 
 wholly neglected might completely alter the reckoning for a 
 time so long ago. The heating power of the sun, when one- 
 fifth below the mean at the aphelion, would be one-fifth above 
 it in the perihelion. The swiftness and the nearness exactly 
 compensate each other; so that the amount of heat falling on 
 the earth within one degree or minute of longitude is the 
 same in every part of the orbit. Thus for the whole year the 
 total heat which falls on the eai*th can be scarcely at all afiected 
 by the eccentricity, and even the ratio, for either hemisphere, 
 of the total heat received in the summer and the winter half- 
 yeai", from equinox to equinox, will not depend on the eccen- 
 tricity, but on the inclination of the axis alone. And so, 
 while variations of the eccentricity could thus have only a 
 slight and secondary effect in a period of successive years, 
 other causes might have a far greater effect, on which no exact 
 data can be given, such as the proportions of land and sea, 
 the varying transparency of the earth's atmosphere, or changes 
 in the absolute heating power of the sun, 
 
 A change of views once widely received is also in progress 
 with reference to the distances of the stars and nebulee, and 
 the structure of the stellar universe. Sir W. Hei'schol, in his 
 earlier papers, assumed a near equality in the absolute size of 
 the stars, and accounted for their unequal light by unequal 
 distance alone. Hence enormous estimates of the remoteness 
 of the smaller stars and the nebula), reaching to sixty or
 
 28 
 
 a hundred thousand years of the journey of h'ght. But since 
 difference of apparent brightness may arise either from real 
 diversity of size or greater distance^ the reasonable course, till 
 deciding evidence is obtained, is to share the effect equally 
 between the two causes. On this view the high estimates of 
 thirty, sixty, or a hundred thousand years of light, will 
 reduce themselves to those of 300, 420, and 550 years. 
 Herschel's own discovery of binary and multiple stars did 
 much to set aside the basis of his earlier speculations. The 
 Magellanic clouds yielded further evidence against them. All 
 recent discovery has tended in the same line, to prove that 
 physical relations exist between stars very unequal in size, or 
 stars and nebula?. The spectroscope is fast completing the 
 same revolution in our view of the stellar universe. And 
 Mr. Proctor has shown in another way that "the brilliancy of 
 stars is no satisfactory criterion of their proximity.^' 
 
 The uncertainties and errors on which I have dwelt belong to 
 physics, and its most advanced and certain portion, astronomy. 
 The same nebulous character must apply still more to geology, 
 where the data are far more complex; and most of all to 
 physiology, and the sciences that deal with life and living 
 creatures. Here the growth of conjectures, claiming the name 
 of science, and falsely so called, has been surprising and pro- 
 digious. A whole school of physiologists have arisen, who can 
 persuade themselves, and try to force their own conviction on 
 others, that the many thousand existing or extinct species of 
 animals have been developed out of each other, by gradual 
 change, through intermediate forms a thousandfold more nu- 
 merous. And yet of these millions of subspecies, bridgiug over 
 the ten thousand intervals of known species, no single speci- 
 men now survives, or has been found in the immense number 
 of the actual fossils of geology. Such a view is more like 
 madness reduced to method than the sober and deliberate 
 verdict of reasonable men. But then it relieves those who 
 hold it from the bugbear which alarms and repels them, the 
 need of any special acts of creation by an intelligent Author 
 and Maker of the universe. 
 
 Now even in astronom}^, where there is the lai'gest nucleus 
 of solid truth, how much remains nebulous and obscure ! The 
 law of gravitation has been proved, and more than proved, by 
 the researches of the last two hundred years. But there cluster 
 around it, even now, some of the wildest fancies that ever 
 entered the mind of man. Matter certainly exists; though 
 this is denied by some philosophers, and others balance the 
 error by asserting that nothing exists beside it. But the
 
 29 
 
 views of its true nature are so diverse as almost to bring into 
 doubt the very fact they seek to explain. Ether also exists; 
 though here the doubters have more excuse, and are more 
 numerous. But the contrast and variety in opinions as to 
 its precise nature are greater still. Conservation of energy 
 is a truth, inductively proved within certain limits, and in 
 reference to lifeless matter and ether in all their forms. But 
 some affirm it to be the first of a priori truths, far more certain 
 than the Being of God. And they extend it to all living 
 things; which involves the singular doctrine that men and 
 animals must like or dislike all things in a strictly equal degree, 
 whenever they are at the same distance. Others retain in 
 words this creed of the conservation of energy, but replace it 
 really by the counter-doctrine of its ceaseless dissipation and 
 loss. The concussion theory of solar heat has been taken up 
 and abandoned within the last twenty years. The contraction 
 theory is now in vogue, but cannot fail to share the fate of its 
 short-lived predecessor. The molten nucleus theory of the 
 earth's structure has reigned for two or three generations, 
 and is now finally disproved. The astro-glacial theory, born 
 only the other day, has no stamina of life, and will probably 
 die to-morrow. The teaching of the elder Herschel on the 
 distribution of the stars is being fast superseded, through 
 the reasoning of his no less eminent son on the Magellanic 
 clouds, and by other still later discoveries. The words of 
 Cato in Addison apply even to this clearest part of this scientific 
 landscape : 
 
 A wide, vinbounded prospect lies before me, 
 But shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it. 
 
 As a general rule, those speak most boastfully of the 
 achievements of modern science who understand them the 
 least; and those impute credulity to Christian believers most 
 freely, who are practising it themselves in a more aggravated 
 form. They will not believe the Scriptures to be really the 
 word of God, though confirmed by miracles and prophecies, 
 and the experience of tens of thousands, who have found them 
 to bring moi'al strength, and deep and lasting peace to their 
 inmost souls. But they can accept with implicit faith guesses 
 not twenty years old on the supposed state of the earth or sun 
 myriads of years ago, and believe in hundreds of thousands 
 of years of man's existence on the sole evidence of a few cores 
 or scrapers or flakes of flint, assumed to bear marks of human 
 work, and found in strata of indeterminate age ; because this 
 opinion is now current, for a few years past, in some scientific
 
 30 
 
 circles. They are part of that unthinking multitude^ whom 
 Cowper has described — 
 
 Too weak to bear 
 The insupportable fatigue of thought ; 
 And therefore swallowing, without pause or choice, 
 The total grist unsifted, husks and all. 
 
 Thus not only uncertain guesses, but, in more cases than one, 
 palpable errors and self-contradictions have been enshrined 
 in their new Pantheon as certain and axiomatic truths. 
 
 " Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be in- 
 creased.^'' This voice of God to Daniel, spoken two thousand 
 four hundred yeai's ago, was chosen by Lord Bacon for the 
 motto of his great work, and has been signally verified in our 
 own days. Railways, steamboats, electric telegraphs, bear 
 witness to the new powers man has acquired, the swifb running 
 to and fro of multitudes, and his mastery over the earth on 
 which he dwells. Mountains have been tunnelled, the depths 
 of ocean sounded, the rays of sunlight and starlight analyzed, 
 and isthmuses traversed by the fleets of the world. Eclipses 
 and transits, predicted to a second, show the perfect knowledge 
 he has gained of the heavenly motions. The spectroscope is 
 bringing hourly within our reach, in the depths of the firma- 
 ment, much that until of late was thought inaccessible. The 
 change is in progress still. And what is the revealed purpose 
 and issue of this growth of natural science ? God is enlarging 
 the base and pedestal, on which to rear a glorious building of 
 moral and spiritual truth. The knowledge of nature is linked 
 inseparably with the knowledge of man. Man cannot be 
 known aright without the knowledge of his Creator and 
 Sovereign. This threefold cord can be neither untwisted nor 
 broken. It is of God's own framing, and cannot be sundered 
 by the hands of men. 
 
 It has been said poetically of the ocean, that "his great 
 bright eye most silently up to the moon is cast.'' With 
 still more truth it may be affirmed — all Nature looks upward 
 and points upward to the throne of God. Creation is a vast 
 storehouse of types of heavenly truth, and is full of secret 
 prophecies of the good things to come. The heavens and 
 earth can never be measured and weighed aright, without 
 leading to the knowledge of Him who " telleth the number of 
 the stars, and calleth them all by their names " ; who metes the 
 ocean as in the palm of his hand, and weighs the mountains 
 in scales, and the hills in a balance. Life can never be studied
 
 31 
 
 aright, or its true nature and laws discerned, apart from Him 
 who is the Lord and the Giver of Life, who breathed it into 
 man^s nostrils in the hour of his birth, and whom traly to 
 know is life eternal. As a general rule, the chief discoverers 
 in Natural Science have been Christians of a modest, reverent, 
 and religious tone of mind. Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, 
 Boyle, Pascal, Newton ; and in the past and present century, 
 Euler, Cavendish, Cuvier, Brewster, Sedgwick, Whewell, 
 Faraday, have all combined ardour in physical research with 
 a spirit of reverence for Christian truth. They have entered 
 into Bacon^s prayer, that no unlocking of the secrets of 
 nature may cause blindness to the higher mysteries and 
 messages of the word of God; and the axiom of Newton, 
 that the object of physics is to trace phenomena up to their 
 causes, climbing to those more and more simple and general, 
 " till we come to the First Cause, which is certainly, not me- 
 chanical." 
 
 For myself, I can see no cause whatever for alarm to the 
 Christian in the growth of what calls itself scientific disbelief. 
 The divorce of physics from Christian faith and piety may be 
 permitted for a moment, but it can never last. There is no 
 science, but the extreme of folly, in the Atheist creed, that 
 trillions of atoms were their own creators, that each chose for 
 itself, in the moment of its birth, where it should pitch its 
 ever-moving tent, and whether it should be an atom of matter 
 or one of ether, and endued itself further with the promise 
 and potency of every form of life that exists in the depths of 
 ocean, on earth, or in heaven. I have no faith even in the 
 desponding Theism which holds that the sun is a spendthrift 
 and a prodigal, wasting nearly all its light and heat in 
 riotous living, losing it in empty space, and is thus doomed 
 justly, after a few millions of years, to utter bankruptcy, and 
 eternal, midnight darkness. But of one thing we may be 
 sure without the shadow of a doubt. The vSun of Righteous- 
 ness, in His deep compassion and love, once suffered eclipse for 
 a moment. But that hour of brief darkness is past, and can 
 never return. He must reign, till all be subdued unto Him 
 in heaven and in the earth. He must and will shine, and 
 shine on for ever. The chiefs and leaders of science tlien only 
 occupy their true place, and fulfil aright their appointed office, 
 when they copy the heavenly elders, cast down their meaner 
 chaplets and coronets before the throne of the Most High, and 
 take up with heart and voice that celestial song of praise — 
 " Thou art worthy, Lord, to receive honour, and glory, and 
 power ; for Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure 
 they are, and were created. '*
 
 Since these remarks were penned, I have seen in the Bevxie des Deux 
 Mondes, of May 15, the following note to an able article on recent solar 
 discoveries : — 
 
 " The apparent analogy of this double belt of spots, which extends on one 
 side and another of the solar equator, with the terrestrial zone of the trade 
 winds has led Sir J. Herschel and IVI. Spoeren to suppose the existence of 
 winds of the same kind at the surface of the sun. But the theory of solar 
 trade winds wants any serious foundation, for one does not see what 
 could produce on the atmosphere of the sun a circulation like that which 
 is the cause of terrestrial winds. — " La Constitution de Soleil," note 2 
 p. 445. 
 
 The view here set aside, because the writer "does not see" any serious 
 ground for it, is precisely the same which I have stated, to result from the 
 laws of dynamics, applied to a joint system of matter and self -repulsive ether; 
 and which has thus the sanction of two of the foremost names in general 
 astronomy and spectroscopy, from direct observation of the solar phenomena 
 alone.
 
 ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING, 
 
 HELD AT THE HOUSE OF THE SOCIETY OF ARTS, 
 Monday, May 29, 1876. 
 
 The Right Honourable the Earl op Shaftesbury, K.G., 
 President, in the Chair. 
 
 The Honorary Secretary, Capt. F. Petrie, read the following 
 Report : — 
 
 TENTH ANNUAL REPORT of the Council of the 
 Victoria Institute, or Philosophical Society op 
 Great Britain. 
 
 Progress of the Institute. 
 
 1. In presenting the Tenth Annual Report, the Council 
 desires to state that the progress of the Society, due in no small 
 degree to the personal interest taken in its welfare by those who 
 have become its supporters, has been such as to encourage the 
 hope that it may speedily be adequately powerful to undertake 
 all it was designed to accomplish ; but that this hope may be 
 realized, it is not the less necessary that those eJBTorts which 
 have placed it in its present position should not be relaxed. 
 The average increase of Members and Associates during the 
 past five years has been upwards of one hundred annually, and 
 the actual number of additional names has slightly increased 
 each year. Such progress has gi^eatly contributed towards 
 making the objects of the Society more widely known, and its 
 work more tellinjr,* 
 
 * During the year, 1875, 115 Members and Associates have joined (18 
 being foreign, 64 country, and 33 resident in town). 
 
 F
 
 34 
 
 2. The election of the Vice-Presidents and Council 
 been carried out in accordance with the proposition agreed to 
 at the 1874 Annual Meeting, namely, by voting-lists being 
 forwarded to the members. The following have been elected : 
 
 President. — The Right Honourable the Earl op Shaptesbuet, K.G. 
 
 Vice-Presidents, 
 The Eight Honourable the Earl op Harrowby, K.G. 
 
 Philip Henry Gosse, Esq., F.E.S. 
 Charles Brooke, Esq., M.A., F.R.S., P.R.M.S., &c. 
 Rev. Robinson Thornton, D.D. C. B. Radcliffe, Esq., M.D., &c. 
 W. FoRSYTu, Esq., Q.C., LL.D., M.P. Rev. Principal T. P. Boultbee, LL.D. 
 
 Hon. Treaswer. — William Nowell West, Esq. 
 
 Eon. Sec. and Editor of Journal. — Capt. F. W. H. Petrie, F.G.S., F.R.S.L., &c. 
 
 Coimcil. 
 
 Robert Baxter, Esq. {Trustee). 
 
 Rev. A. De la Mare, M.A. 
 
 Rear- Admiral E.G. Fishbourne, R.N., 
 
 C.B. 
 R. N. Fowler, Esq. (Trustee). 
 William H. Ince, Esq., F.L.S., 
 
 F.R.M.S. 
 Alex. M'Arthtjr, Esq., M.P. 
 Edward J. Morshead, Esq.,H.M.C.S. 
 
 (Hon. Foreign Sec). 
 Alfred V. Newton, Esq. 
 William M. Ord, Esq., M.D. 
 S. D. Waddy, Esq., Q.C., M.P. 
 William Vanner, Esq., F.R.M.S. 
 Alfred J.WooDHOusE,Esq.,F.R.M.S. 
 Rev. J. H. RiGG, D.D. 
 
 Rev. Prebendary Row, M.A. 
 
 Rev. Canon Titcomb, M.A. 
 
 J. A. Fraser, Esq., M.D., I.G.H. 
 
 Rev. Charles Graham. 
 
 T. W. Masterman, Esq. 
 
 H. Cadman Jones, Esq., Barrister-at- 
 
 Law. 
 Rev. J. G. Wood, M.A., F.L.S., &c. 
 Rev. W. Arthur, D.D. 
 C. R. Bree, Esq., M.D., F.Z.S. 
 John Eliot Howard, Esq., F.R.S. 
 Rev. G. W. Weldon, M.A., M.B. 
 Rev. Principal J. Angus, M.A., D.D. 
 J. Bateman, Esq., F.R.S., F.L.S 
 The Master of the Charterhouse. 
 
 3. The library has received several valuable additions through 
 the generosity of members. 
 
 4. The Council regrets to announce the decease of the 
 following valued supporters of the Institute : — 
 
 The Kev. Prebendary E. B. Elliott (Member) ; T. Ensor, 
 Esq. (Foundation Associate) ; the Rev. G. Lawless, M.A. 
 (Associate) ; the Ven. Archdeacon Long, M.A. (Member) ; 
 P. McFarlanc, Esq. (Foundation Life Member) ; W. Foster 
 Newton, Esq. (Member) ; S. H. Smith, Esq. (Associate) ; the 
 Ven. Archdeacon Stanton, M.A. (Member) ; the Kev. J. 
 Williams, M.A. (Foundation Associate).
 
 35 
 
 5. The followiug is a statement of the changes which have 
 occurred during the past twelve months : — 
 
 Life Annual 
 
 Members. Associates. Members. Associates. 
 Numbers on 1st 
 
 June, 1875 .... 29 13 294 248 
 
 Deduct deaths ... 1 — 4 4 
 
 28 290 244 
 
 Withdrawn — — 9 14 
 
 281 230 
 
 Joined between 
 June 1st, 1875, 
 and May 1st, 
 1876 2 1 46 G7 
 
 30 14 327 297 
 
 44 624 
 
 Total 668* 
 
 Hon. Foreign Correspondents and Local Secretaries, 13. 
 
 Finance. 
 
 6. The Audited Balance Sheet of the Treasurer for the yeai 
 ending 31st December, 1875, is appended, showing a balance 
 due to the Treasurer of £14,t It will be observed that the 
 Balance Sheet is no longer divided under two heads {'' General 
 Account,^^ and '^ Special Fund for Library,^^ &c.). The total 
 amount now invested in the New Three per Cent. Annuities 
 is £666. Os. Id. 
 
 7. The arrears of subscription are now as follows ; — 
 
 1872. 1873. 1874. 1875. 
 
 Members 13 3 6 
 
 Associates 1 1 3 11 
 
 2 4 6 17 
 
 * Joined during May, 3 Members and 6 Associates ; total, 677, and 
 1.3'= 690. The total number on the 1st of January, 1871, was 201. 
 
 t It should bo noted that the sum of .£71. lis. was due to the Society 
 from various Members and Associates on account of unpaid subscriptions for 
 the year 1875 ; all but £23. 4s. of this has since been paid. {Sec sect. 7.)
 
 36 
 
 8. The estimated ordinary assets of the Institute for the 
 current year, exclusive of arrears and of new subscribers, are 
 as follows : — 
 
 Annual Subscribers. 
 
 327 Members, at d£>2. 2s 
 
 297 Associates, at £1. Is 
 
 Vice-Patrons, Life Members, 
 
 and Life Associates. 
 (Dividend on £666. Os. Id. 
 
 Three per Cent. Stock) . . 18 11 
 
 £. 
 
 s. 
 
 681 
 
 14 
 
 311 
 
 17 
 
 Total £1012 2 
 
 Meetings. 
 
 9. The following is a list of the papers for the present 
 session, viz. : — 
 
 " On Present Day Materialism." Eev. J. McDougall. December 6, 
 1875. 
 
 On Scepticism." By the Eev. Eobinson Thornton, D.D., V.P. ; being 
 the Fourth and concluding portion of the Arguments brought forward 
 in the Author's Papers on " The Logic of Scepticism," " The Credulity 
 of Scepticism," " The Varying Tactics of Scepticism," read in 1866, 
 1869, and 1874. The present Paper will be entitled " The Sorrows of 
 Scepticism." January 3, 1876. 
 
 An Examination of a work entitled " The Unseen Universe, or Physical 
 Speculations on a Future State " ; its Scientific Conclusions and 
 Theological Inferences. By Eev. Prebendary W. J. Irons, D.D. 
 January 17. 
 
 " On Heathen Cosmogonies compared with the Hebrew." By Eev. B. W. 
 Savile. February 7. 
 
 " On Traces of early Phoenician, Jewish, and Carthaginian Intercourse wi 
 the British Isles." By F. A. Allen, Esq. February 21. 
 
 " Tlie Horus Myth." By W. E. Cooper, Esq., Sec. Soc. of Biblical 
 Archaeology. March 6. 
 
 On " A Critical Examination of the Flint Knives from Brixham Cavern." 
 By N. Whitley, Esq., C.E. (With Photographic Illustrations.) 
 March 20. 
 
 •' Egypt and the Bible." By J. E. Howard, Esq., F.R.S. AprU 3. 
 
 " The Place of Science in Education." By Professor A. Alleyne Nicholso 
 M.D. (St. Andrew's University). AprU 10. 
 
 " The Metaphysics of Scripture." By Professor Challis, F.E.S., F.E.A.S. 
 (Cambridge). May 1. 
 
 Anniversary Address. By Professor Birks, Cambridge. {At the Society of 
 Arts' House, John Street, Adelphi. May 29.
 
 37 
 
 * On " The Theory of Unconscious Intelligence as opposed to Theism." By 
 Professor Morris, M.D., Michigan University. {At the Society of Arts'' 
 House, John Street, Adelphi.) June 19. 
 
 (Extra Meeting) Special Discussion on Eev. Prebendary Irons' Paper, read 
 January 17th* as above. July 3. 
 
 10. The meetings during this session have been as well 
 attended as usual, the Anniversary, and the meeting of the 
 19th of June being held at the House of the Society of Arts, 
 the rooms of the Institute not affording adequate accom- 
 modation. 
 
 Puhlications. 
 
 11. The Ninth Volume of the Journal of Transactions has 
 been issued, and the several quarterly parts for the current 
 year will appear in due course. 
 
 12. In the publication of the Transactions the Council has 
 continued the practice of printing in full the papers read, and 
 the discussions thereon, so that country and foreign members, 
 although unable to be present at the meetings, may enjoy, as 
 far as possible, the same advantages as those attending them ; 
 and in many instances communications in regard to important 
 points not taken up at the meetings have been sent in by 
 country members. These, being added to the Journal, have 
 enhanced its value. 
 
 13. Lectures (in furtherance of Object V.) have been given 
 in England and Ireland by some of the members, the papers in 
 the Journal being the basis of such lectures. One member 
 in a North of England town (noted for the prevalence of 
 scepticism therein) has been giving lectures for some 
 time past, once, and sometimes twice, a week, to audiences 
 of from 1,500 to 2,000. This member reports that he 
 has found in the Journal exactly that which he needed 
 for his work, and which he had looked for in vain 
 elsewhere. — The Institute is also indebted to him for a 
 considerable addition to its Library. — In Italy the papers in 
 the Journal are translated and published.' — In India, the 
 Journal has been found valuable in work among the Brahmins.* 
 
 * The late Sir Donald McLeod urged strongly the need of extending the 
 Institute's sphere of action to India, &c. See Speech at Annual Meeting, 
 vol. vii. p. 180.
 
 38 
 
 — In America, the Transactions are becoming popular; and 
 the impartiality of the mode of carrying out the investigations 
 has attracted attention. 
 
 14. The Hon. Local Secretaries have been added to, ancl 
 their work is being supplemented by, the efforts of other 
 members, and by two supporters of the Institute now making 
 a tour in some of the colonies. Such efforts not only promote 
 the first objects of the Society, and increase its powers of 
 action, but also tend to make the Society, its design, and its 
 publications, more widely known. 
 
 15. The " People's Edition." — The vast amount of unsound, 
 and in many cases avowedly infidel, cheap literature on philo- 
 sophical and scientific subjects, now in circulation, espe- 
 cially in the larger towns of the United Kingdom, induced 
 the Council in 1874 to begin the issue in a cheap form of 
 single copies of some of the papers in the Journal ; since then 
 six papers have been issued in this form, entitled "The 
 People's Edition.'' The plan has been carried out, by deciding 
 beforehand upon the paper to be so issued, and, when it was 
 printed for the Journal, striking off extra copies upon common 
 paper. For the sale to the public of the " People's Edition " 
 (and of the Journal generally) a scheme of bookseller- 
 agents in fifteen leading towns of the United Kingdom, having 
 been matured, has been in full operation since August last : 
 the results have in some cases exceeded anticipation. Nearly 
 half the Institute's accumulated stock of single papers has 
 been issued to these Agents, some of whom have begun to 
 include our publications in their own Qirculated list of 
 books. Although the profits have been small, by reason of 
 the low scale of prices necessarily adopted for the '' People's 
 Edition " when starting the scheme, yet the importance of the 
 step taken will be apparent. Altogether about 20,000 copies 
 of the papers which appear in the Journal of the Transactions 
 were published in a separate form during 1875, and the 
 demand for them appears to be increasing. 
 
 16. From time to time the Institute receives requests from 
 clergymen, missionaries. Scripture-readers, &c., for grants of 
 the single papers, for circulation amongst certain classes of 
 the population (working-men in manufacturing, mining, and 
 other districts — especially those districts in Avhich lectui*ers 
 or literature advocating views tending to scepticism are 
 common). The smallness of the "People's Edition" Fund 
 (founded by a non-member) has not allowed of more ttan
 
 39 
 
 a few such requests being complied with; but should this 
 fund receive further support,* the Institute will be better 
 able to meet any urgent application of the kind. 
 
 Conclusioii. 
 
 17. The good understanding existing between this and 
 other scientific societies continues to increase, and with many 
 of the leading ones at home and abroad, the Institute exchanges 
 Transactions. 
 
 18. Finally, the future of the Victoria Institute rests in 
 no small degree with its present supporters ; it is most im- 
 portant that it be maintained in a state of thorough eflficiency, 
 and the present Members and Associates may greatly con- 
 tribute thereto by introducing new supporters ; more especially 
 such as may take a leading part in carrying out its objects. 
 
 19. The Council cannot but feel thankful for the success 
 which has attended the Society^s exertions, and the place it 
 occupies in the estimation of those best qualified to judge of 
 its value. 
 
 Signed on behalf of the Council, 
 
 SHAFTESBURY, President. 
 
 * The donation of J50 from Mr. J. E. Howard, F.R.S., to this fund was, 
 according to stipulation, expended in issuing a large edition of his paper on 
 Professor Tyndall's Belfast address.
 
 40 
 
 DONATIONS TO THE ENDOWMENT FUND. 
 
 1873. £. s. d. 
 
 C. J. Bevan, Esq. (non-member).., 10 10 
 
 C. W. H. Wyman, Esq 1 1 
 
 1875. 
 
 Miss CURTEIS 110 
 
 (Ftinded.) 
 
 DONATIONS TO THE LIBRARY FUND. 
 1869. 
 
 S. MoRLEY, Esq., M.P 100 
 
 I. Braithwaite, Esq 25 
 
 E. MuLLiXGS, Esq 10 
 
 Dr. J. H. Wheatlet 10 
 
 H. "W. Blebt, Esq., B.A 5 
 
 T. Prothero, Esq 3 3 
 
 A. J. WooDHOUSE, Esq 3 3 
 
 W. N. "West, Esq 2 2 
 
 G. Williams, Esq... 110 
 
 Rev. J. H. RiGG, D.D 1 1 
 
 1870. 
 
 Robert Baxter, Esq 52 10 
 
 W. McArthur, Esq., M.P 21 
 
 John Napier, Esq: , G?a5grow 10 
 
 AV; Vaxxer, Esq 10 
 
 T. TV. Masterma>% Esq 5 5 
 
 S. D. Waddy, Esq. Q.C., M.P 5 5 
 
 Charles Brooke, Esq., F.R.S 5 
 
 Dr. Eraser 5 
 
 Vice- Admiral Halsted (the late) 5 
 
 Rev. C. Kemble, M.A. (the late) 5 
 
 Rev. W. Nn-EN, B.D 5 
 
 S. Petrie, Esq., C.B. (the late) 5 
 
 Rev. J. H. A. Walsh, M.A. (the late) 5 
 
 Rev. A. De la Mare, M.A 3 3 
 
 Rev. R. Thornton, D.D • 3 3 
 
 A. V. Newtox, Esq 3 
 
 Rev. J. B. Owen, M.A. (the late) 3 
 
 Captain Jasper Selwyn, R.N. , TWngr 3 
 
 Rev. W. H. Bathurst, M.A 2 2 
 
 E. Ch Ay CE, Esq., J. P., Malvern 2 2 
 
 W. H. Ince, Esq 2 2 
 
 John Shields, Esq., Dwr/iam 2 2 
 
 Rev. G. R. Badenoch 110 
 
 J. Lewis, Esq., B,.lif.,Sov.thamptoti 110
 
 41 
 
 £. s. d. 
 
 Rev. Preb. Row, M.A 110 
 
 Very Rev. Dean Payn-e Smith, D.D 110 
 
 Bev. Canon TiTcoiiB, M.A 110 
 
 G. C. Harrison, Esq 10 
 
 W. Payne, Esq 1 ^ <^ 
 
 J. Shaw, Esq., M.D., Boston 1 ^ (' 
 
 Rev. C. Serine, M.A 1 
 
 1872. 
 
 A. McArthur, Esq 42 
 
 Admiral Halsted (the late) 2 2 <:> 
 
 1873. 
 
 C. W. H. Wyman, Esq 1 1 
 
 1874. 
 
 Right Hon. Lord Shaftesbury, K.G 20 
 
 Rev. C. A. Belli 1 1 
 
 J. W.Lea, Esq 1 1 
 
 1875. 
 
 A. Woodhouse 3 
 
 Miss CURTEIS 110 
 
 {Now used up.) 
 
 DONATIONS TO THE PEOPLE'S EDITION FUND 
 DURING PAST YEARS. 
 
 Received in 1873 and 1874 £12. 
 
 1875. £. 
 
 J. E . Howard, Esq., F.R.S. (for a Special Paper) 5(1 
 
 G. Harries, Esq 10 
 
 I. Braithwaite, Esq 5 
 
 F. BissET Hawkins, Esq., M.D., F.R,S 5 
 
 Rev. J. Rate 2 
 
 J. H. Wheatley, Esq., Ph.D 2 
 
 A. Woodhouse, Esq 2 
 
 Rev. Preb. Brooks ] 
 
 Miss Curteis 1 
 
 Admiral NoLLOTH, R.N 1 
 
 s. 
 
 d. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 .5 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 £79 8 
 {Noi9 used up.)
 
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 10, ADELPHI TERRACE, STRAND, LONDON, W.C. 
 
 OBJECTS. 
 
 rriHIS SOCIETY has been founded for the purpose of promoting the following 
 ■*- Objects, which are of the highest importance both to Religion and Science, 
 and such as have not been attempted to be attained by any previously-existing 
 scientific Society, viz. : — 
 
 First. — To investigate fully and impartially the most important questions of 
 Philosophy and Science, but more especially those that bear upon the great 
 truths revealed in Holy Scripture, with the view of reconciling any apparent 
 discrepancies .between Christianity and Science. 
 
 Second. — To associate Men of Science and Authors who have already been 
 engaged in such investigations, and all others who may be interested in 
 them, in order to strengthen their efforts by association, and by bringing 
 together the results of such labours, after full discussion, in the printed 
 Transactions of an Institution ; to give greater force and influence to proofs 
 and arguments which might be little known, or even disregarded, if put 
 forward merely by individuals. 
 
 Third. — To consider the mutual bearings of the various scientific conclusions 
 arrived at in the several distinct branches into which Science is now 
 divided, in order to get rid of contradictions and conflicting hypotheses, and 
 thus promote the real advancement of true Science ; and to examine and 
 discuss all supposed scientific results with reference to final causes, and the 
 more comprehensive and fundamental principles of Philosophy proper, based 
 upon faith in the existence of one Eternal God, who in His wisdom created 
 all things very good. 
 
 Fourth. — To publish Papers read before the Society m furtherance of the above 
 objects, along with full reports of the discussions thereon, in the form of a 
 Journal, or as the Transactions of the Institute. 
 
 Fifth. — When subjects have been fully discussed, to make the results known by 
 means of Lectures of a more popular kind, and to publish such Lectures. 
 
 Sixth. — To publish English translations of important foreign works of real 
 scientific and philosophical value, especially those bearing upon the relation 
 between the Scriptures and Science ; and to co-operate with other philo- 
 sophical societies at home and abroad, which are now or may hereafter be 
 formed, in the interest of Scriptural truth and of real Science, and generally 
 in furtherance of the objects of this Society. 
 
 Seventh. — To found a Library and Reading Rooms for the use of the Members 
 of the Institute combining the principal advantages of a Literary Club.
 
 COUNCIL AND OFFICERS FOR 1876-77. 
 
 Prestdent.— The Right Honourable the Earl op Shaftesbury, K.G. 
 
 Vice-Presidents. 
 
 The Eight Honourable the Earl oF Harrowby, K.G. 
 
 Philip Henry Gosse, Esq., F.R.S. Charles Brooke, Esq., M.A., F.R.S., P.R.M.S., &c. 
 
 C. B. Kadcuffe, Esq., M.D., &c. Rev. Robinson Thornton, D.D. 
 
 W. Forsyth, Esq., Q.C., LL.D., M.P. Rev. Principal T. P. Boultbee, LL.D. 
 
 Honorary Corresj)ondeiits. 
 
 Principal J. W.' Dawson, LL.D., F.R.S. 
 
 Rev. R. Main, M.A., F.R.S., V.P.R.A.S. (The Raddiffe Obsener). 
 
 Professor K. A. WiJRTZ, F.R.S. (Pres. of the Assoc, of France for the Advancement of Science). 
 
 Professor Joachim Barrande, Prague (and others). 
 
 Honorary Treasurer.— WihLi am Nowell West, Esq. 
 
 Hon. Sec. and Editor of Journal.— Ca.pta.m F. W. H. Petrie, F.G.S., F.R.S.L., &c. 
 
 Rev. Canon TiTCOMB, M.A. 
 
 J. A. Eraser, Esq., M.D., I.G.H. 
 
 Rev. Charles Graham. 
 
 T. W. Masterman, Esq. 
 
 H. Cadman Jones, Esq., Barrister-at-Law 
 
 John Eliot Howard, Esq., F.R.S. 
 Rev. G. W. Weldon, M.A., B.M. 
 Rev. Principal J. Angus, M.A., D.D. 
 J. Bateman, Esq., F.R.S., F.L.S. 
 The Master of the Charterhouse. 
 
 Robert Baxter, Esq. (Trustee). 
 
 Rev. A. De la Mare, M.A. 
 
 Vice- Admiral E. G. FishbouRNE, C.B. 
 
 R. N. Fowler, Esq. (Trustee). 
 
 William H. Inge, Esq., F.L.S., F.R.M.S, 
 
 Alex. M'Arthur, Esq., M.P. "S Rev. J. G. Wood, M.A., F.L.S 
 
 E. J. MoRSHEAD, Esq.,H.M.C.S.,i?o». i'^oj-. s Rev. W. Arthur, D.D. 
 
 Alfred V. Newton ,Esq. [Cor. ^ C. R. Bree, Esq., M^D., F.Z.S., &c. 
 
 William M. Ord, Esq., M.D. 
 
 S. D. Waddy, Esq., Q.C., M.P. 
 
 William Vanner, Esq., F.R.M.S. 
 
 Alfred J. Woodhouse, Esq., F.R.M.S. 
 
 Rev. Principal J. H. RiGG, D.D. 
 
 Rev. Prebendary Row, M.A. 
 
 " MEMBERSHIP. 
 
 Forms of Application for Admission and all information may be had on" application. 
 The Annual Subscription for Members is Two Gxdneas, with One Guinea Entrance Fee ; * 
 
 the Annual Subscription for Associates is One Guinea, without Entrance Fee. 
 
 In lieu of Annual Subscriptions, the payment of Twenty Guineas will constitute a Life 
 
 Member, and Ten Guineas will constitute a Life Associate. The payment of a Donation of 
 
 not less than Sixti/ Guineas qualifies for the office of Vice-Patron, with all the privileges of 
 
 uLifeMemb or Life Associate. 
 
 '[It is to be understood, that only such as are professedly Christians are entitled to 
 
 become 31 embers.] 
 
 %* All Subscriptions are due in advance on the First day of January in each year, and 
 should be promptly paid to the "Victoria Institute's" credit at Messrs. "Ransom," 
 1, Pall Mall East, S.W., or remitted to W. N. West, Esq., at the Institute's Office. In 
 the latter case Cheques should be made payable to the "Victoria Institute or Order, '^' 
 and crossed "Ransom & Co."— Post-office Orders, drawn on "London (Chief Office)," 
 should be made payable to " W. N. West," and crossed in like manner. 
 
 PRIVILEGES. 
 
 Members— are presented with the First (or, if desired, the Second) Volume of. the 
 Journal of the Transactions, andean obtain any other Volumes of the Transactions m5?(£c^ 
 prior to their joining the Institute at half-price (half a guinea each), or the Quarterly 
 Parts for past years at half a crown each, (all other Publications are free). They 
 are entitled— to a Copy of the Journal for the years during which they may sub- 
 scribe, either in the Quarterly Parts, or the Annual (bound) Volume, and of any 
 other documents or books which may be published under the auspices of the Society in 
 furtherance of Object VI.,— to the use of the Library, Reading and Writing Rooms,— and to 
 introduce two Visitors at each Ordinary Meeting. The Council are chosen from among the 
 Members, who alone are eligible to vote by ballot in determining any question at a General 
 Meeting. 
 
 Assoclates— may obtain, at reduced prices, any Volume or Part of the Journal of the 
 Transactions, issued j)rior to their joining the Institute, or any documents or books published 
 under the auspices of the Society : they are entitled to— a copy of the Journal for the current 
 year, in the Quarterly Parts, or the Annual (bound) Volume,— and to introduce one Visitor 
 at each Ordinary Meeting. 
 
 Members and Associates have the right to be present and to state their opinion 
 at all Meetings of the Society. 
 
 The Meetings of which duo notice is given, are held at 10, Adelphi Terrace, at Eigh 
 o'clock on the evenings of the First and Third Mondays of the Winter, Spring, and Summer ^.b a 
 Months. Proof Copies of the Papers to be read can be had by those desirous of placing their ^ 
 opinions thereon before the JMembcrs (when vuiable to attend, they can do this in writing). — (JIUC 
 The Papers read, and the Discussions thereon, are printed in full ia the "Journal of *^ 
 Transactions ; " hence. Country and Foreign Members, although unable to be present, enjoy, ^** 
 as far as possible, the same advantages as those who attend the ^Meetings. 
 
 The Library, Reading, and Writing Rooms are open from ten till five (Saturdays till two). 
 
 * All members are oresented vrith the first Volume of Transactions (or the aecond, if preferred.)
 
 THE VICTORIA INSTITUTE. 
 
 The Society is now supported by exactly 700 Subscribing Members ; including His 
 Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, and other Prelates and leading Ministers of Religion, 
 Professors of English and Foreign Universities, Literary and Scientific Men in general, 
 and others favourable to the Objects. 
 
 The following are the names 
 The Right Eev. Bishop Abraham. 
 The Rt. Rev. the Bishop of Adelaide. 
 Hon. G. Allen, Speaker,M.L.A.,N.S. W. 
 William S. Allen, Esq., M.P. 
 Rev. Professor Appelbe, LL.D., Belfast. 
 R. Davies, Esq., M.P. 
 Rev. Canon Argles, M.A., Stamford. 
 The Hon. William Ashley. 
 Rev. Prebendary E. Aubiol, M.A. 
 The Right Hon. A. S. Ayrton. 
 H. T. Bagster, Esq. 
 The Dean of Bangor. [larat. 
 
 The Right Rev. the Bishop of Bal- 
 Hanbury Barclay, Esq., Tamworth. 
 Rev. J. Bardsley, M.A., Liverpool. 
 The Hon. C. Barter, Natal. 
 Pri;Hci2)am.BABTLE,D.D.,Ph.D.,LL.D. 
 Rev. J. Baylee, D.D., Ilfracombe. 
 Right Rev. Bishop E. H. Beckles, D.D. 
 The Hon. H. M. Best. 
 F. A. Bevan, Esq. 
 R. C. L. Bevan, Esq. 
 Rev. Eugene Bersier, Paris. 
 Very Rev. Dean Bickersteth, D.D. 
 Rev. Professor Birks, M.A., Cambridge. 
 Rev. J. S. Blackwood, D.D., LL.D. 
 Rev. Sir T. E. W. Blomefield, Bart. 
 The Ven. Archd. Boutflower, M.A. 
 Professor Boutflower, Agra, E.T. 
 Rev. W. B. Boyce, D.D. 
 Rev. Canon R. E. Brooke, M.A., Bath. 
 Rev. H. M. Butler, D.D. {Harrow.) 
 Isaac Braithwaite, Esq. 
 W. H. Budgett, Esq., Bristol. 
 Capt. Bodghey Burgess, U.S. Inst. 
 Rev. Preb. W. Cadman, M.A. 
 Rev. Professor Campbell, Montreal. 
 Rev. W. B. Carpenter, M.A. 
 T. K. Callard, Esq., F.G.S. 
 His Grace the Archbishop of 
 
 Canterbury. 
 The Dean of Canterbury. 
 Rev. Canon W. Carus, M.A., Winton. 
 The Right Hon. Stephen Cave, M.P. 
 REV.Pro/cssor J.CHALLis,F.R.S.(Cam6.) 
 
 The Right Rev. the Lord Bishop 
 of Chester. 
 
 Rev. a. M. W. Christopher, M.A. {Oxf.) 
 
 T. CoLAN, Esq., M.D., R.N. 
 
 The Rt, Rev. Bishop Cottekill, Edin. 
 
 of some of the Members :— 
 
 Lieut.-General Crawford, R.A, 
 
 Sir E. H. Currie. 
 
 Maj.-Gen. Sir H. C. Daubeney, K.C.B. 
 
 Rev. C. Deane, D.C.L. 
 
 The Right Hon. the Earl of 
 
 Dartmouth. 
 Principal J. W. Dawson, LL.D., F.R.S., 
 
 McGill College, Montreal. [Derry. 
 The Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of 
 W. W. Fitz- William Dick, Esq., M.P. 
 Rev. a. Duff, D.D., Moderator. 
 Rev. Professor Eaton. M.A., Oxford. 
 The Hon. J. Fairfax, Esq., N.S. Wales. 
 S. FiNLEY, Esq., Canada. 
 Rev. F. Garden, M.A., Sub-Dean^ 
 
 Gha2)els Royal. 
 A. E. Gayer, Esq., Q.C, LL.D. 
 Sydney Gedge, Esq. [Doncaster. 
 
 The Hon. and Rev. E. Carr Glyn, 
 Rev. Sir George L. Glyn, Bart. 
 Rev.T.Goadby,B. A. (Pres. Chilwell Coll.) 
 J. N. GoREN, Esq. 
 Rev. Principal F. W. Gotch, LL.D. 
 Captain H. D. Grant, R.N., H.M.S. 
 A. Haldane, Esq. [Serapis. 
 
 Rev. Canon R. H. Gray, M.A. 
 Very Rev. Dean Hamilton, F.R.S. 
 
 F.R.A.S., Salisbury. 
 The Right Hon. the Earl of 
 
 Harrowby, K.G. 
 Rev. J. Harvard, Birmingham. 
 BissET Hawkins, Esq., M.D., F.R.S. 
 The Ven. Archdeacon Hessey, D.C.L. 
 Canon C. A. Heurtley, D.D., M. Pro- 
 fessor of Divinity, Oxford. 
 Rev. J. Hill, D.D. 
 Rev. Canon Hoare, Timbridgc Wells. 
 Professor C. Hodge, D.D., LL.D., 
 
 Princetoxim Univ., U.S.A. 
 Sir J. M'N. Hogg, K.C.B., M.P. 
 Professor J. M. Hoppin, D.D., Yale 
 
 College, U.S.A. 
 Capt. W. Horton, R.N. 
 J. Houldsworth, Esq. 
 Rev. Canon Walsiiam How, M.A. 
 David Howard, Esq., F.C.S. 
 James Howard, Esq., Bedford. 
 The Ven. Archd. A. Huxtable M.A. 
 Joseph Ince, Esq., FJj.S., F.C.S. 
 Prebendary Irons, D.D. 
 The Ven. Archdeacon Jacob, M.A. 
 Sir G. le G. Jacojj, K.C.B. 
 J. Jardine, Esq., LL.D.
 
 THE VICTORIA INSTITUTE. 
 
 Sir J. H. Kennaway, Bart., M.P. 
 Rev. John Kennedy, M.A., D.D, 
 Rev. T. L. Kingsbury, M.A., Pe^vsey. 
 Rev. Professor J. Kirk, Edinburgh. 
 Rev. J. Knapp, A.C.K., Portsea. 
 Rev. Canon Erskine-Knollys, M.A. 
 Lt.-Gen. Sir A. J. Lawrence, K.C.B. 
 The Right Rev, the Lord Bishop 
 
 OF Llandaff. 
 J. W. Lea, Esq., B.A. [of Div., T.C.D. 
 Ven. Archdeacon W. Lee, D.D., Prof. 
 Rev. Professor Lee, D.D., Glasgow. 
 Rev. Professor J. J. Lias, M.A., St. 
 
 David's College. 
 Rev. Canon Liddon, D.D., D.C.L., 
 
 I. Professor of Exegesis, Oxford. 
 Sir T. D. Lloyd, Bart. 
 Mons. a. Lombard, Geneva. ■ 
 The Right Hon. and Right Rev. the 
 
 Lord Bishop of London. 
 The Hon. Sir R. Lush. 
 Sir Francis Lycett. [Gloucester. 
 
 Rev. Canon Lysons, M.A., F.S.A., 
 Rev. W. Magill, Dean Queen's Coll. 
 Rev. R. Main,M.A.,F.R.S.,V.P.R.A.S., 
 
 Badcliffe Observer, Oxford University. 
 Rev. M. Margoliouth, LL.D., Ph.D. 
 His Grace the Duke of Marl- 
 borough, K.G. 
 Mr. Alderman McArthur, M.P. 
 Rev. Professor S. McAll. 
 Rev. A. I. McCaul, M.K^King's College. 
 Rev. Canon J. B. McCaul, M.A. 
 Rev. J. M'Cann, M.A., LL.D., Glasgow. 
 The Right Rev. Bishop M'Dougall. 
 The Lord Bishop of Melbourne. 
 Lt.-Col. the Hon. H. M. Monckton. 
 Joseph Moore, Esq. 
 Samuel Morley, Esq., M.P- [Univ. 
 Professor G. S. Morris, M. A., Michigan 
 Rev. H. Moule, M.A., Fordington. 
 Rev. W. F. Moulton, D.D., Cambridge. 
 Canon J. B. Mozley, D.D., Begins 
 
 Professor of Divinity, Oxford, 
 The Rt. Rev. the Bishop of Nelson, 
 
 Neiv Zealand. 
 Professor H. Alleyne Nicholson, M. A., 
 
 M.D., Ph.D., St. Andrew's University. 
 Admiral Nolloth, R.N. 
 The Very Rev. the Dean of 
 
 Norwich. 
 The Right Hon. the Lord O'Neill. 
 Sir Henry W. Peek, Bart., M.P. 
 The Right Rev. Bishop Perry, D.D. 
 John Penn, Esq., F.R.S. 
 Rev. G. T. Perks, M.A. 
 
 J. S. Phen^, Esq., LL.D., F.L.S., &c. 
 
 Professor J. S. Porter, D.D. 
 
 Rev. E. de PressensjS, B.Th., Paris. 
 
 Rev. Aubrey C. Price, M.A. 
 
 Rev. W. M. Punshon, LL.D. [Belfast. 
 
 The President of Queen's College, 
 
 John Rae, Esq., LL.D., F.S.A. 
 
 His Grace theDuke of Rutland, K.G. 
 
 Mr. Serjeant Sargood, Q.C. 
 
 Rev. Robinson Scott, D.D., Belfast. 
 
 Rev. Professor H. R. Reynolds, D.D. 
 
 The Right Rev. Bishop Ryan. 
 
 Rev. Canon Ryle, B.D. 
 
 Rev. W. Saumarez Smith, B.D,, Prin- 
 cipal of St. Aida7i's College. 
 
 Admiral J, H. Selwyn, R.N., Tring. 
 
 W. DiGBY Seymour, Esq., Q.C, LL.D. 
 
 G. Shann, Esq., M.D., F.R.C.P., York 
 
 Benjamin Shaw, Esq. 
 
 J. Shaw, Esq., M.D., F.L.S., Boston. 
 
 The Right Hon. the Earl of Shrews- 
 bury and Talbot. 
 
 Rev. Gervase Smith, M.A. 
 
 Protheroe Smith, Esq., M.D.,M.R.C.P. 
 
 P. Vernon Smith, Esq., Bar. -at- Law. 
 
 Samuel Smith, Esq., Liverpool. 
 
 Rev. A.W. W. Steel, M.A. {Cai^is Coll.) 
 
 Mark J. Stewart, Esq., M.P. 
 
 The Hon. P. C, Sutherland, Surveyor- 
 General, Natal. 
 
 Canon 0. A. Swainson, D.D., Norrisian 
 Prof, of Divinity, Cambridge. 
 
 The Right Hon. Lord Teignmouth. 
 
 Rev. a. Thomson, D.D., Edinburgh. 
 
 Rev. J. P. Thompson, D.D., LL.D., 
 Berlin. 
 
 Rev. Sir W. R. T.-M.-L.-Tilson, Bart. 
 
 Rev. F. W. Tremlett, D.C.L., Ph.D. 
 
 Rev. Canon Tristram, M.A., F.R.S. 
 
 Robert Trotter, Esq. 
 
 The Right Rev. Bishop Trower. 
 
 P. Twells, Esq., M.P. 
 
 Samuel Vincent, Esq. 
 
 Rev. Professor H. Wage, M.A. 
 
 John Walter, Esq., M.P. 
 
 Rev. Professor Watts, D.D., Belfast. 
 
 The Ven. Archdeacon Whately. 
 
 J. H. Wheatley, Esq., Ph.D., Sligo. 
 
 N. Whitley, Esq., C.E., Truro. 
 
 The Ven. Archd. Wickham, M.A. 
 
 Rev. Principal Willis, M.A., Cud- 
 desdon. 
 
 Professor J. Woodrow, D.D., M.D., 
 Ph.D., Columbia, S. Carolina. 
 
 T. V. Wollaston, Esq., M.A., F.L.S., 
 &c., Teignmouth. 
 
 *»* The names of those Prelates and others, who are supporters, but have not as yet joined 
 as Members, are omitted in this List.
 
 THE VICTORIA INSTITUTE. 
 
 PBOQBESS OP THE INSTITUTE, 
 
 Members and Associates— 1st January, 1871, 203. Joined since.— In 1871, 91 ;— in 
 1872, 109 ;-in 1873, 110 ;-in 1874, 111 ;-in 1875, 115. 
 
 PUBLICATIONS. 
 
 Since the Inauguration of the Society, on the 24th of May, 1866, the 
 following Papers have been read : — The Quarterly Parts are indicated by the 
 numbers. 
 
 In 1866-7. 
 
 1. A Sketch of the Existing Relations between Scripture and Science. By the late 
 
 George Warington, Esq., F.C.S. 
 
 2. On the Difference in Scope between Scripture and Science. By the lata C. MOUNTFORD 
 
 Burnett, Esq., M.D., Vice-President V.I. 
 On Comparative Philology. By the Rev. RoBiNSON Thornton, D.D., Vice-President V.I. 
 On the Various Theories of Man's Past and Present Condition. By the late James Reddie, 
 
 Esq., Hon. Sec. V.I. 
 
 3. On the Language of Gesticulation and Origin of Speech. By Professor J. R. YoUNO. 
 
 On Miracles : their CompatibiUty with Philosophical Principles. By the Rev. W. W. 
 
 English, M.A. 
 Thoughts on Miracles. By the late E. B. Penny, Esq. 
 On the General Character of Geological Formations. By the late E. HOPKINS, Esq., C.E. 
 
 4. On the Past and Present Relations of Geological Science to the Sacred Scriptures. By the 
 
 Rev. Professor John Kirk. 
 On the Lessons taught us by Geology in relation to God. Rev. J. Brodie, M.A. 
 On the Mutual Helpfulness of Theology and Natural Science. By Dr. GLADSTONE, F.R.S. 
 On Falling Stars and Meteorites. By the late Rev. W. Mitchell, M. A., Vice-President V.I. 
 
 {The above Paiyers, with the Discussions thereon, and with " Scientia Scientiamini ; 
 ieing some Account of the Origin and Objects of the Victoria Institute,^' with the 
 Reports of the Provisional Proceedings, and the Inaugural Address by the late 
 Rev. Walter Mitchell, M.A., Vice-President, form Volume I. oj the "Journal of 
 Transactions," price One Guinea.) 
 
 5. /On the Terrestrial Changes and Probable Ages of the Continents, founded upon Astronomical 
 Data and Geological Facts. By the late EvaN Hopkins, Esq., C.E., F.G.S. 
 
 On the Credibility of Darwinism. By the late George Warington, Esq., F.C.S. 
 
 On the Credibility of Darwinism. By the late James Reddie, Esq., Hon. Sec. V.I. 
 
 On Utilitarianism. By the late James Reddie, Esq., Hon. Sec. V.I. 
 
 On the Logic of Scepticism. By the Rev. Robinson Thornton, D.D., V.P. 
 
 Annual Address (On the Institute's Work). By -the late James Reddie, Esq., Hon. Sec. V.I. 
 
 On the Relations of Metaphysical and Physical Science to the Christian Doctrine of 
 Prayer. By the Rev. Professor John Kirk. 
 
 On Geological Chronology, and the Cogency of the Arguments by which some Scientific 
 Doctrines are supported. (In reply to Professor Huxley's Address delivered at Sion 
 College on 21st Nov., 1867.) By the late J. Reddie, Esq., Hon. Sec. V.I. (1867-68). 
 
 On the Geometrical Isomorphism of Crystals, and the Derivation of all other Forms from 
 \ those of the Cubical System. (6 Plates.) By the late Rev. W. Mitchell, M.A., V.P. 
 
 (Forming Volume II., price One Guinea.) 
 
 In 1867-8. 
 
 9. On the Antiquity of Civilization. By the Rev. Canon TiTCOMB, M.A. 
 
 On Life, with some Observations on its Origin. By J. H. Wheatley, Esq., Ph.D. 
 
 On the Unphilosophical Character of some Objections to the Divine Inspiration of Scripture. 
 By the late Rev. Walter Mitchell, M.A., Vice-President V.I. 
 
 On Comparative Psychology. By E. J. Moushead, Esq., Hon. For. Sec. V.I. 
 10. On Theology as a Science. By the Rev. A. De la Maue, M.A. 
 
 On the Immediate Derivation of Science from the Great First Cause. By R. Lamino, Esq. 
 
 On some of the Philosophical Principles contained in Mr. Buckle's " History of Civiliza- 
 tion," in reference to the Laws of the Moral and Religious Developments of Man. By 
 the Rev. Prebendary C. A. Row, M.A. 
 
 On the Nature of Human Language, the Necessities of Scientific Phraseology, and th« 
 Application of the Principles of both to the Interpretation of Holy Scripture. By 
 the Rev. J. Batlee, D.D.
 
 11. On the Common Origin of the American Races with those of the Old Worid. By the Rev. 
 
 Canon Titoomb, M.A. 
 On the Simplification of First Principles in Physical Science. By C. Brooke, Esq. , F. R. S. , &c. 
 On the Biblical Cosmogony scientifically considered. By late G. Warington, Esq., F.C.S, 
 
 In 1868-69. 
 
 On Ethical Philosophy. By the Rev, W. W. English M.A. 
 
 12. On some Uses of Sacred Primeval History. By the late D. McCausland, Esq., Q.C., LL.D. 
 On the Relation of Reason to Philosophy, Theology, and Revelation. By the Rev. Pre- 
 bendary C. A. Row, M.A. 
 
 {Forming Volume III., price One Guinea.) 
 
 'Analysis of Human Responsibility. By the Rev. Prebendary Irons, D.D. (And part 16.) 
 
 On the Doctrine of Creation according to Darwin, Agassiz, and Moses. By Prof. KiRK. 
 
 On the Noachian Deluge. By the Rev. M. Davison. 
 
 On Life— Its Origin. By J. H. Wheatley, Esq., Ph.D. 
 
 On Man's Place in Creation. By the late Professor MaCDONALD, M.D. 
 
 On More than One Universal Deluge recorded in Scripture. By Rev. H. MoULE, M.A. 
 
 On Certain Analogies between the Methods of Deity in Nature and Revelation. By the 
 
 Rev. G. Henslow, M.A., F.L.S. 
 On the Respective Provinces of the Observer and the Reasoner in Scientific Investigation. 
 
 By the Rev. Edward Garbett, M.A. 
 On the Credulity of Scepticism. By the Rev. R. THORNTON, D.D., V.P. 
 
 16. I On Current Physical Astronomy. By the late J. Reddie, Esq., Hon. Sec. V.I. 
 Analysis of Human Responsibility. By Rev. Preb. Irons, D.D. (See part 13.) Concluded. 
 
 (Forming Volume IV., price One Guinea.) 
 
 In 1869-70, 
 
 17. On the Origin of the Negro. By the Rev. Canon Titcomb, M.A, 
 
 On the Testimony of Philosophy to Christianity as a Moral and Spiritual Revelation, By 
 
 the Rev. Prebendary C. A. Row, M.A. 
 On the Numerical System of the Old Testament. By the Rev. Dr. Thornton, V.P. 
 
 18. On Spontaneous Generation ; or, the Problem oi Life. By the Rev. Professor KiRK. 
 A Demonstration of the Existence of God By the Rev. J. M'Cann, D.D. 
 
 Why Man must Believe in God. By the late James Reddie, Esq., Hon. Sec. V.l. 
 
 19. On Geological Proofs of Divine Action. By S. R. Pattison, Esq., F.G.S. 
 On True Anthropology. By W. Hitchman, Esq., M.D. 
 
 On Comparative Psychology. (Second Paper.) By E. J. Morshead, Esq., Hon. For. Sec. V.I. 
 On the Argument from Design. By the late Rev. Walter Mitchell, M.A., V.P. 
 
 In 1870-71. 
 
 20. On the High Numbers in the Pentateuch, By P, H. GosSE, Esq., F.R.S., V.P. 
 Israel in Egypt. By the Rev, H. Moule, M.A. 
 
 {Forming Volume V., price One Guinea.) 
 
 21. fOn CiviUzation, Moral and Material. (Also in Reply to Sir John Lubbock on "Primitive 
 Man,") By the late J. Reddie, Esq., Hon. Sec. V.I. (1869-70.) 
 
 On Dr. Newman's "Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent." By the Rev. Preb. Row, M.A, 
 
 22. On the Evidence of the Egyptian Jlonuments to the Sojourn of Israel in Egypt. By the 
 Rev. B. W. Savile, M.A. 
 
 On The Moabite Stone, by Captain F. Petrie, Hon, Sec. 
 
 On Phyllotaxis ; or, the Arrangement of Leaves in Accordance with Mathematical Laws. 
 
 By the Rev. G. Henslow, M.A., F.L.S. 
 On Prehistoric Monotheism, considered in relation to Man as an Aboriginal Savage. Ey 
 
 the Rev. Canon TiTCOMB, M.A. (1871-72.) 
 
 23. On Biblical Pneumatology and Psychology. By the Rev. W, W. ENGLISH, M.A, 
 On Some Scriptural Aspects of Man's Tripartite Nature, By the Rev, C, Graham. 
 On Ethnic Testimonies to the Pentateuch. By the Rev. Canon TiTCOMB, M.A. 
 
 24. On the Darwinian Theory, By the Rev. Prebendary IRONS, D.D. 
 
 In 1871-72. 
 
 Serpent Myths of Ancient Egypt. By W. R. Cooper, Esq,, Sec. Soc. Biblical ArchKology, 
 I 129 Illustrations. 
 
 {Forming Volume VI., price One Guinea.) 
 
 25. On Natural Theology, considered with respect to Modern Philosophy. By the Rev. G. 
 
 Henslow, M.A., F.L.S. 
 On Fatalism. Contributed by the Rev, J, RoBBiNS, D,D, 
 
 26. On Darwinism Tested by Recent Researches in Language. Ey F, Bateman, Esq., M.D., &c. 
 On Force and its Manifestations. By the Rev. J. M'Cann, D.D. 
 
 On Professor Tyndall's " Fragments of Science for Unscientific People." By the Rev, 
 
 Prebendary Irons, D.D. 
 On the Origin of the Moral Sense. By the Rev. Professor KiBE,
 
 THE VICTORIA INSTITUTE. 
 
 In 1872-73. 
 
 On Force and Energy. By Charles Brooke, Esq., M.A., F.R.S., V.P. 
 
 27. On Darwinism and its Effects upon Religious Thought. By C. R. Bree, Esq., M.D,, &c. 
 
 Remarks on some of the Current Principles of Historic Criticism. By Rev. Preb. Row, M.A. 
 On "Scientific Facts and Christian Evidence." By J. Eliot Howard, Esq., F.R.S., F.L.S. 
 
 28. On the " Law of Creation— Unity of Plan, Variety of Form." By Rev. G. W. Weldon, M.A. 
 
 Some Remarks on the Present Aspect of Enquiries as to the Introduction of Genera and 
 Species in Geological Time. By Principal J. W. Dawson, LL.D., F.R.S. 
 
 {Forming Volume VII., price One Guinea.) 
 
 (On "Force." By the Rev. Professor Kirk. 
 
 29. The Palasolithic Age Examined. By N. Whitlet, Esq. and the late W. D. MiCHELL, M.D, 
 (Annual Address.) On the Moral and Social Anarchy of Modern Unbelief. By the Rev. 
 Principal T. P. Boultbee, LL.D., Vice-President. {People's Ed.) 
 
 In 1873-74. 
 
 30. On the Identity of Reason in Science and Religion. By the Rev. R. MITCHELL. 
 On Buddhism. By the Right Rev. Bishop Piers C. Claughton, D.D., &c., with communi- 
 
 / cations from Professors Chandler and Brewer. 
 
 31. 
 
 32. 
 
 \0n the Contrast between Crystallization and Life. By John Eliot HOWARD, Esq., F.R.S. 
 . On the Brixham Cavern and its Testimony to the Antiquity of Man — examined. By N. 
 
 Whitley, Esq., Sec. Royal Inst, of Cornwall. 
 On the Rules of Evidence as applicable to the Credibility of History. By W. FORSTTH, 
 
 Esq., Q.C., LL.D., M.P., Vice-President. {People's Ed.) 
 On the Principles of Modern Pantheistic and Atheistic Philosophy as expressed in the last 
 
 work of Strauss, Mill, &c. By the Rev. Prebendary C. A. Row, M.A. Paper on the 
 
 same, by Professor Challis, F.R.S. {People's Ed.) 
 On " Prehistoric Traditions and Customs in Connection with Sun and Serpent Worship." 
 \ By J. S. Phen4 Esq., LL.D., F.L.S., &c., with Illustrations. (1872-73.) 
 
 (Forming Volume VIII., price One Guinea.) 
 
 33. On the Varying Tactics of Scepticism. (Annual Address.) By the Rev. ROBINSON 
 
 Thornton, D.D., Vice-President. {People's Ed.) 
 On the Harmony between the Chronology of Egypt and the Bible. By the Rev. B. W. 
 
 Savile, M.A. 
 On the Ethical Condition of the Early Scandinavian Peoples. By E. W. GOSSE, Esq. 
 
 34. On Magnitudes in Creation and their bearings on Biblical Interpretation. By the Rev. 
 
 Canon TiTCOMB, M.A. Paper on the same, by Professor Challis, F.R.S. ; with com- 
 munications from the Astronomer Royal's Department, the Radclifife Observer, and 
 Professor Pritchard, F.R.S. 
 
 On Biblical Interpretation in connection with Science. By the Rev. A. I. McCaul, M.A. 
 (King's College), with a communication by Principal J. W. Dawson, LL.D., F.R.S. 
 
 On the Final Cause as Priuciiale of Cognition and Principle in Nature. By Professor G. S. 
 Morris, of Michigan University, U.S. 
 
 In 1874-75. 
 
 35. On the Bearing of certain Palaeontological Facts upon the Darwinian Theory of the Origin 
 
 of Species, and of Evolution in General." By Professor H. A. Nicholson, M.D., D.Sc, 
 
 F.G.S., &c. 
 On the Early Dawn of Civilization, considered in the Light of Scripture. By J. E. Howard, 
 
 Esq., F.R.S. 
 On the Indestructibility of Force. By the Rev. Professor BiRKS, M.A. 
 oG. On Mr. Mill's Essays on Theism. By Rev. Preb. W. J. Ikons, D.D. 
 
 {Forming Volume IX., price One Guinea.) 
 
 ^7 
 
 38. 
 
 39. 
 40. 
 
 On the Chronology of Recent Geology. By S. R. Pattison, Esq., F.G.S. 
 
 On the Nature and Character of Evidence for Scientific Purposes. By the Rev. 
 
 J. M'Cann, D.D. ^ 
 
 The Relation of the Scripture Account of the Deluge to Physical Science. By Professor 
 
 CUALLis, M.A., F.R.S., F.R.A.S. 
 An Examination of the Belfast Address from a Scientific point of view. By J. E. Howard 
 
 Esq., F.R.S. {People's Ed.) 
 Annual Address : ISIodern I'hilosophic Scepticism examined. {People's Ed.) By the Rev. 
 
 'B..U.ias,¥.R.^.,\.]?.B..K.'A.,Tli,eRadcliffe Observer. 
 On the Etruscan Language. By the Rev. Isaac Taylor, M.A. 
 
 In 1875-76. 
 On " Present Day Materialism." By the Rev. J. McDougall. 
 
 On the Sorrows of Scepticism. By Rev. R. Thornton, D.D., Vicc-Pres. (aee parts C 15 33 ) 
 On Heathen Cosmogonies, compared with the Hebrew. By Kev. B. W. Savile m'.A.' 
 On the Place of Science in Education. By Professor II. A. Nicholson, M.D. ' 
 ^On Egypt and the Bible. By J. E. Howard, Esq., F.R.S. 
 
 {Forming Volmw X., price One GuimM.)
 
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 All joining the Institute are entitled to the whole of the 
 Transactions for the year for which they pay their first 
 Subscription. The various privileges of Members and 
 Associates are given in the accompanying " Object Paper," 
 page 2.
 
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