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 heavy tomes of orthodox theology which have appeared within the last decade. Mr. Picton has combined science, logic, disciplined imagination, and fervent piety in the execution of a task of immense difficulty; and the result is a cogent testimony to the indestructibility of essential religion in the soul of man.

James Allanson Picton was born in Liverpool in the historic year of reform, 1832. His father, whose name was recently so honorably before the public as the originator and chairman of the Liverpool Free Library and Museum, was then a well-to-do architect, a stanch Liberal in a community abounding in political re-actionaries, a cultivator of letters in a hive of commercial industry. He is the author of the "Memorials of Liverpool," a model work of the land, and would now have been occupying the mayoralty chair in the town council but for unscrupulous aldermanic partisanship.

At an early age young Picton was sent to what was then known as the High School, the upper branch of the Mechanics' Institution, where up to his sixteenth year he continued to make steady progress in all the ordinary, and some of the extraordinary, branches of study. On leaving school, Picton entered his father's office, and for the next three years of his life diligently set himself to master the requirements of the paternal profession, which, if he had continued to follow it, would pretty certainly have been to him a lucrative calling.