Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/512

496 to it. Any infidel book that had gone as far toward extirpating the miraculous from Christianity would have been pitched into the flames as blasphemous by every devout believer. The grand central miracle of Christianity, among all orthodox people held as a belief too sacred to be approached in a rationalistic way, is the supernatural genesis of its divine founder. And yet this reverend biologist of Boston attacks the subject with the microscope, quotes Haeckel to prove that bees multiply without the intervention of the male, claims that this principle "extends to the higher forms of life," and, "in the presence of Almighty God," suggests that Christ may have originated in the same natural way. He even thinks that if this fact of parthenogenesis in natural history had been sufficiently known it would have been potent in saving men from skepticism by relieving their perplexities respecting the parentage of the Saviour, and he cites a conspicuous illustration, as follows: "When a great soul like the tender spirit of our sainted Lincoln, in his early days, with little knowledge, but with great thoughtfulness, was troubled with this difficulty, and almost thrown into infidelity by not knowing that the law that there must be two parents is not universal, I am willing to allude, even in such a presence as this, to the latest science concerning miraculous conception." "The latest science!" Perhaps Mr. Lincoln, after all, with his "little knowledge," was not so ignorant as our biological lecturer, who seems not to know that the Swiss naturalist, Bonnet, had established asexual multiplication, in the case of plant-lice, three-quarters of a century before Lincoln was born.

We must not, however, expect too much, and are glad of any earnest scientific discussion in theological quarters. A book from a clergyman, bearing the title of "Biology," has not only the commendable merit of novelty, but it is an encouraging sign of the times, and a promising precedent for the future. Nor should we be too exacting in regard to the quality of first efforts, as theology is certainly not the best preparation for biology. Yet when a Christian preacher takes up the science, and we allow for the imperfections of treatment to be naturally expected of an inquirer in an unfamiliar region, we are still entitled to demand candor, fairness, and conscientious painstaking honesty of statement. Though we may not get intelligence, we ought, at least, to have common morality. We propose briefly to test Mr. Cook's book by this very moderate standard, and will take his first position as a sample. We shall thus be enabled not only to get a good measure of the claims of his work, but to correct a popular misapprehension of some consequence.

It is generally known that Prof. Huxley, a few years ago, examined a substance brought up from the sea bottom, and announced it as a newly discovered form of protoplasm, to which he gave the name of Bathybius; and it is currently supposed that he afterward abandoned this view as erroneous. Mr. Cook begins his biology with an account of this matter. Its first sentence is as follows: "In 1868 Prof. Huxley, in an elaborate paper in the Microscopical Journal, announced his belief that the gelatinous substance found in the ooze of the beds of the deep seas is a sheet of living matter, extending around the globe." We have carefully read that article, and have found no such statement, and nothing equivalent to it, there. Dr. A. P. Peabody, of Harvard University, reviewing the book we are now considering, says that "Mr. Cook's reasonings are based in no instance on his own statement of physical or scientific truth or fact; but always on the expressly-quoted words of writers of universally admitted authority." This is contradicted by the very first utterance of Mr. Cook, in which