Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/650

624 forgotten that a cyclopædia in a family, like a piano, must be used to be good for anything. It should be ready of access; and, instead of keeping it away in the library, or locking it up in a stately bookcase, it should be placed in a separate and open case in the room most commonly occupied by the family, and where the volumes can be reached by the very smallest amount of effort. By adopting this plan, a bright family will soon find the Cyclopædia among the first of daily necessities, and a source of constant pleasure and instruction. The publishers have anticipated this want of separate cases for their work, and supply them when desired; but any cabinet-maker will manufacture them at a trifling cost.

appearance of this volume will take many people by surprise. Although Prof. Gray is widely known in the world of science for his botanical researches, and in the world of education by his valuable textbooks, but few are aware that he is a pronounced and unflinching Darwinian, or that he has been an able and vigorous defender of the doctrines that pass under this name, ever since they were first promulgated. He has written much upon this subject in various periodicals, but, caring only to let the arguments go for what they are worth, he has modestly withheld his name from the articles, the effect being that his position upon the question has not been a matter of notoriety. His contributions to the discussion are varied and valuable, and, as collected in the present volume, they will be seen, to establish a new and unexpected claim upon the thinking world, which we are sure will be extensively felt and cordially acknowledged.

The history of what may be called the Darwinian discussion, in some of its aspects, is most curious and instructive. We complacently point back to those narrow and prejudiced times, from which we have happily escaped, when novel scientific opinions were rejected on the most frivolous and puerile grounds, urged by those who knew nothing whatever about them. But have we really much improved on those old practices, and do we even yet recognize that plain rule of common-sense, to leave the discussion of serious and difficult scientific questions to those who are competent to deal with them? Our times are eminent for just the contrary procedure. With all our vaunted liberalization, we dare not leave scientific questions to scientific men. In the history of the scientific controversies of the last three centuries there is no instance that will compare with this of "Darwinism," when the community has been so bewildered and misled by irrelevant and childish discussion on the part of grossly incompetent writers. The press has teemed with essays and books by men who were not only unfamiliar with the problems involved, and utterly ignorant of the sciences upon which their solution depends, but who had no intelligent conception even of the issues to be settled. Clergymen, lawyers, metaphysicians, littérateurs, having no acquaintance with natural history, and knowing nothing of the requirements, difficulties, and perplexities of scientific investigation, have rushed into the debate with a confidence and pretension contrasting strongly with the spirit of those who have given their lives to the study. Here comes another of these impudent and worthless performances, "A Critical Examination of some of the Principal Arguments for and against Darwinism," by James Maclaren, M. A., barrister-at-law; and what are the claims of this writer to attention? Why, he has written a book on the "History of the Currency;" and, with the mental equipment which such a work and his professional education imply, he assumes to deal with the greatest problem that has ever presented itself to the mind of man, a problem which belongs purely to science, and is engrossing the severest scrutiny of the most thoroughly disciplined scientific minds of the age.

Dr. Gray's book offers a refreshing contrast to this shallow strain of Darwinian literature. It comes of a direct, first-hand, and thoroughly familiar knowledge of the elements and objects which enter into the inquiry, and outweighs whole libraries of such productions as we have here referred to. The author says, in his preface: "If these papers are useful at all, it will be as showing how these new views of our day are regarded by a practical naturalist, versed in