Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/281

Rh of many men of high standing who yet recognize and accept its truths. It is this sort of neglect or cowardice, I think, which emboldens some minds to gratify their resentment of opinions or views they have a sentimental repugnance to by indulging in the sly thrust; trusting to the perhaps unpopular nature of the matter for their immunity from consequences.

I can not conceive Helen Zimmern being as ignorant of Malthus's writings as the words I quote from her paper would imply; and I am very unwilling to suppose she would willfully misrepresent.

Editor Popular Science Monthly:

Of course the name "Alaska" is a slip of the pen with Madame Le Plongeon in the September Popular Science Monthly, whatever other locality the distinguished writer may have had in mind. The only pottery to be seen in Alaska is exceedingly rude, perhaps the worst in the world. The Athapascans of the interior boil food in baskets and boxes, with hot stones. The thngit (Koloschan) of the coast have no pottery, using boxes of alder and other woods for vessels. The Aleuts have no pottery and no substitutes therefor, except such dishes as they make from driftwood. But the Eskimo tribes about Bristol Bay do mix up mud with hair and blood to form their lamps and grease bowls. Excepting this rude ware, there was no pottery made by the Pacific coast tribes between the Santa Barbara Islands, Lower California, and the Eskimo of Bristol Bay. Thirty-five of the families or stocks of Indians north of Mexico are not known to have ever practiced making pottery.



N more than one occasion lately we have had to note the growing liberality of theological thought in relation to scientific questions; and we now have before us another striking example of the same tendency in an address delivered at the recent Church Congress in England by Archdeacon Wilson, of Manchester, on The Bearing of the Theory of Evolution on Christian Doctrine. Thoughtless critics sometimes endeavor to cast ridicule upon the clergy for troubling themselves with discussions of this kind. Their idea is that theologians should expound and develop their doctrines in entire independence of, if not indifference to, what the scientific world may be doing, and that the scientific workers should equally ignore theology. We can not accept such a view. The human mind is not built in thought-tight compartments, if we may use the expression. Every thought honestly entertained claims the privilege of traveling everywhere, and asks for illustration and confirmation wherever it goes. If the scientific man is a religious man he will want to blend his science with his religion, and the religious man will want to know that the doctrines to which he adheres are not contradicted by any portion of his acquired knowledge. If the leaders of religious thought were to withdraw from all interest in the teachings of science, the inference would certainly be drawn that they were conscious of a hopeless antagonism between the principles of science and the doctrines of religion. They would seem to present to the world the alternative: "Science or Religion; choose which you will, you can not have both."

Far better is the attitude of those who, believing in both, believing that men have need of religion, and that they can not deny the authority of science, strive to see what measure of 