Page:The Dial vol. 15 (July 1 - December 16, 1893).djvu/78

66] startlingly reminded of one of Lady Gordon's early eccentricities:

The justness of the following description of our heroine's first crocodiles will be recognized by those familiar with both terms of her comparison:

Everything in Thebes appeared to Miss North "too stupendous," seeming, as she says,—

Near the caves of Beni Hassan the writer encountered her first Egyptian "saint," who seems to have been, in some points, very like his historic prototypes:

We shall close our extracts from Miss North's journals with the following description of the journalist herself, given by the Egyptian pilot who took the Norths up the river:

The portrait is certainly more complimentary to its subject than to English "Bints" (we confess to some uncertainty as to the meaning of this term) in general.

There are three illustrations, including portraits of the author and her father, and a pensketch, by a fellow-traveler, which is so absurdly bad that it is difficult to account for its inclusion. 1em

 

Professor Calderwood's work on "Evolution and Man's Place in Nature" belongs to a class of books that may not inaptly be designated as "buffers." Their service is to soften the shock between new scientific doctrine and the dogmas of popular religion. This work has been done for the science of geology, and is now rapidly doing for the new biology that dates from Darwin. Those who have never experienced the need of a reconciliation between religion and science, and those who prefer to devise their own systems of "accommodation," will take but a moderate interest in "buffers." Acute metaphysical minds will find, in some form of Berkeleian idealism, a way out from the disconsolate vision of a merely mechanical world, in which Darwinism, on a first hasty interpretation, seemed to issue. Crude literal materialism has been proved unthinkable, they will argue. Matter that contains in itself the power and potency of all forms of life and thought must be conceived as the manifestation of a power most nearly akin to what we know as mind. Belief in such a world-soul would seem mere pantheism. But it did not seem so to Berkeley; and Berkeley was right. With the Infinite and Unknowable, all things are possible. We cannot tell how far the roots of personality penetrate into the real nature of things; and since we have no right to dogmatize on either side, we may properly throw the weight of our moral and religious feelings into the scale of hope. Evolution explains the process, it does not explain away the fact, of creation. And, like other winds of scientific doctrine that terrified our fathers, 