Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/131

Rh proper object of his book. These papers were written from time to time as results began to come from the "new method," and they are of necessity incomplete. The only object in giving them in their original form is to show exactly Mr. Lockyer's relation to the progress of discovery and research. But the history of the subject is very well known among all interested in it, and Mr. Lockyer's foremost place in certain branches of it is too well established to need a repetition of the formal proofs.

To the scientific worker these papers are already accessible in the original, and, for general purposes, they should have been entirely recast, as they are decidedly not in the best form now.

With regard to the first part of the work we may say that much of it is a repetition of matter which has been thoroughly treated in other books. Some of it consists of accounts of eclipse-work which the author himself did, and the story of this is told in a thoroughly good and interesting way. Mr. Lockyer's accounts of the work of others are eminently fair, and exhibit good feeling and entire appreciation. The chapter on Mr. Carrington's researches on solar spots is an example, and the author's account of the discovery of the new method of viewing prominences which was applied by Janssen and himself, though first conceived by Lockyer, is thoroughly admirable for fairness and candor.

Part I., however, has more serious defects than the final section of the book. It is entirely deficient in judicious arrangement, and its perusal can only confuse the ideas of the learner. It is, in fact, a reprint of essays (each of them good in itself and in its place), which Mr. Lockyer, sometimes alone, sometimes in concert with Mr. Balfour Stewart, contributed to English periodicals, and of occasional lectures.

It abounds in repetitions; sometimes whole paragraphs, almost pages, are printed at least twice, and the whole seems to show a desire, to speak plainly, to "make a book."

We must insist that, while it is, abstractly, a thing to be grateful for that Mr. Lockyer should give his valuable time to the popular exposition of scientific truths, some of which he has been so fortunate as to discover, it is, in the case before us, still a fact that he has added scarcely any thing to the ample information in regard to them which is now accessible, and nothing at all to his scientific reputation.

His character as a man seems to be shown, in his account of his relation to other scientific men—his friends—and that is almost the only outcome of this expensive volume, whose principal fault is a want of a sufficient raison d'être.

reader of this book is long puzzled to discover the fitness of the title to the matter presented for his consideration, nor can he, until, near the end, the author's view is revealed to him, that each generation of mankind, from the conditions of its existence, is subjected to physical persecution—or martyrdom—that the condition of the succeeding generation may be improved. The current theology is repudiated, and with it the idea of the individual existence of the human soul after death. The idea of a God, impersonal, indefinable, and unknowable, is, however, retained and strongly enforced; and with it there seems to be connected in the author's mind, though it is not clearly expressed, an idea that the human soul is immortal in the sense of being a materially embodied part of the great animating power of the universe, into which it lapses—losing its individuality—after the death of the body. To expound these views is really the aim of the book, although it ostensibly purports to be a kind of universal history of human progress, written to show the influence of Africa upon civilization. It is divided into four chapters. The first presents a panoramic portrayal of the ancient civilizations of Egypt and the north of Africa, Asia Minor, Greece, Rome, their rise, maturity, and decay, and the influence they exercised upon each other. The second chapter deals, after the same manner, with mythology, Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism. The third traces the progress of Liberty, giving a comparatively extended account of the origin of the slave-trade and the antislavery movement, and their influence upon American affairs.