The Future Australian Race. By Marcus Clarke. Melbourne. 1877.

We presume that this is the Marcus Clarke who is the author of a very striking novel in three volumes, "His Natural Life." Here he presents us with a paper that fairly takes our breath away. In its twenty-two pages we have a physiognomic history of the British race from the earliest times, with comparative sketches from France and Germany; we have likewise a treatise on the physiological development of nations; and towards the end there is presented to us an examination of the average Australian's temples, eyes, nose, and teeth, with a prophecy of his future, drawn from this inspection. This is altogether the most startling piece of work we can remember to have met within the unassuming and unpromising covers of a pamphlet. Mr. Clarke is a man of great culture, and apparently holds well in command his stores of wide reading. Every sentence he writes is striking. There is much truth in all he says; but he is extravagant, and reduces the study of sociology to the study of digestion. One or two of his extreme utterances may prove amusing to the reader of these pages. After discussing the broad noses and coarse minds of Henry VIII. and his set, Mr. Clarke writes: "Elizabeth's fine and haughty face comes like a burst of sunshine among these gloomy intellects. Who is accountable for that aquiline nose, and that firm, sweetly moulded chin of Louis de Hervé's picture? Anne Boleyn perhaps alone could tell. Elizabeth's nose is a revelation in national physiognomy."

"It is an absolute fact that religion is, in all cases, a matter of diet and climate. The Greek, with pure air, light soil, and placid

scenery, invented an exquisite anthropomorphism, in which he deified all his own attributes. The Egyptian, the Mexican, and the dweller by the Ganges invented a cruel and monstrous creed of torture and death. The influence of climate was so strong upon the ancient Jews that they were per petually relapsing from Theism into the congenial cruelties of Moloch and Astarte. Remove them into another country, and history has no record of a people

save, perhaps, the modern Pagans of our universities-more devotedly attached to the purest form of intelligent adoration of the Almighty. The Christian faith, transported to the Lybian deserts, or the rocks of Spain, became burdened with horrors, and oppressed with saint worship. The ferocious African's Mumbo Jumbo, the West Indian's Debbel-debbel, are merely the products of climate and the result of a dietary scale. Cabanis says that religious emotion is secreted by the smaller intestines. Men think they are pious when they are only bilious. Men who habitually eat non-nitrogenous substances, and pay little attention to the state of their bowels, are always prone to gloomy piety. This is the reason why Scotch men and women are usually inclined to religion."

"There is plenty of oxygen in Australian air, and our Australasians will have capacious chestsalso, cæteris paribus, large nostrils. The climate is unfavourable to the development of a strumous diathesis; therefore, we cannot expect men of genius unless we beget them by frequent intermarriage. Genius is to the physiologist but another form of scrofula, and to call a man a poet is to physiologically insult the mother who bore him. When Mr. Edmund Yates termed one of his acquaintances a 'scrofulous Scotch poet,' he intended to be per

sonal-he was merely tautological. It may be accepted as an axiom that there has never existed a man of genius who was not strumous. Take the list from Julius Cæsar to Napoleon, or from Job to Keats, and point out one great mind that existed in a non-strumous body. The Australasians will be freed from the highest burden of intellectual development."

Notwithstanding that the Australian race is to escape from the evil effects of genius, its future is thus described:

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The conclusion of all this is, therefore, that in another hundred years the average Australasian will be a tall, coarse, strong-jawed, greedy, pushing, talented man, excelling in swimming and horsemanship. His religion will be a form of Presbyterianism; his national policy a democracy tempered by the rate of exchange. His wife will be a thin, narrow woman, very fond of dress and idleness, caring little for her children, but without sufficient brain power to sin with zest. In five hundred years unless recruited from foreign nations-the breed will be wholly extinct; but in that five hundred years it will have changed the face of nature, and swallowed up all our contemporary civilisation."

It will be seen that, at his worst, Mr. Clarke is very amusing. Taking account of the really clever bits of his pamphlet, together with his dismal prognostications regarding the future Australia, we should be inclined to hint that this melancholy author himself has in him a touch of that genius he teaches us to dread; and, at the risk of being personal, we also hint a fear that his own smile might betray decay, for he assures us that "bad teeth mean bad digestion and bad digestion means melancholy."

The Human Eye; its Optical Construction Popularly Explained. By Rev. E. Dudgeon, M.D. Hardwicke and Bogue. 1878.

In this little book there is explained all that any but a professional man need know about the eye. It is popular, without ceasing at any page to be accurate and scientific. Nothing of it is new, except the author's theory of vision under water, and his ingenious adaptation of air lenses to the sight of divers. These air lenses are such that, while they bring sub-aqueous objects into their proper size and position to anyone using them, they do not hinder ordinary vision above water. Perhaps Dr. Dudgeon exaggerates the importance of his discovery; yet he appears to have made good its truth against critics formerly assailed it.

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Table

Uniform Local Time (Terrestrial Time). By Sandford Fleming, Engineer-in-Chief, Canadian Pacific Railway.

This pamphlet deals with an important and practical problem— the reduction of terrestrial time to one common standard. In Great Britain the differences in terrestrial time put us to little inconvenience, save when we pass from or to Ireland. The continental traveller experiences greater difficulty in the management of his watch. The railway passenger from Halifax to Toronto at the end of his journey finds his watch more than an hour fast. New York differs from San Francisco time by three hours and a half; that of England from that of China by eight hours. Mr. Fleming's plan for the reformation of chronometry is elaborately detailed in this treatise, and takes as its unit measure of time the mean solar day. This is divided into twenty-four parts, and each of

these into minutes and seconds. Each of the twenty-four divisions is to correspond with certain known meridians of longitude; and this arrangement being indexed on an ordinary chronometer, the hour hand shall point to each division as it becomes noon at the corresponding meridian. The hour hand shall revolve from east to west with the speed of the earth round its axis. It is proposed that these divisions be known by letters of the alphabet; and as each letter would indicate a true hour, or a twenty-fourth part of the mean time occupied by the diurnal revolution of the earth, the standard thus established might be readily adjusted to and compared with any local time. Thus all railway time tables might have their figures reduced to the common A B C standard; and one system would suffice for the globe. The theory is very ingenious, but not quite so simple as its author would have us believe, for it will work easily only

on an absolute meridian. Still, any calculation it involves would be small compared to that demanded in the comparison of time tables published in different countries.

Verney Court: An Irish Novel. By M. Nethercott. 2 vols. London: Remington.

This is a novel that may be described as only a novel, and for its perusal is required a condition of more or less mental ennui. The story is somewhat improbable, or, we might rather say, is constructed on an old-fashioned model, with an orthodox villain, a weak tool, a servant whose conscience is his master's, a distressed heroine, a gallant gentleman, an oppressed family, &c., &c. A characteristic of the novel which it is possible to praise is its occasional manifestation of the peculiar quality of Irish romantic feeling a sort of mingling of a sense of desolation with the flicker of a fiery purpose, which is not unpoetic in its way.

Chaucer's "Knight's Tale."

PESSIMISM is the great fact of philosophical development to which future historians of our age will turn for its explanation. Long before it became fashionable so to think, many earnest minds, not long passed away, were sadly listening to the great world symphony, and finding that, however the melody may rise or fall, the sullen unvarying bass carries away the burthen. The history of pessimism has yet to be written-and by a future generation, for we are in the thick of it ourselves. It was only at the beginning of the present century that the wave of the Renaissance at last spent its force. It is drawing back: we hear the pebbles rattle in its clutch; we are perhaps about to ebb into a kind of media

valism a mediævalism of the schools, not of the church, of barren logies, not of religion--with neither the lavish architecture of worship nor the sad Christ to look to, but only a half-ambitious, half-despairing individualism for creed. There is none but shares this feeling. How with protest, yet with liking, we turn to the gloomy poetical philosophy that is the only original philosophy of our time, whether it be the harsh prophetic strain of Schopenhauer, or the sublime negations of Strauss, or the pathos of "Gravenhurst," or even the flippant criticism of the "New Republic!" To say that Strauss, or Smith, or Mallock (great with little!) is a pessimist would be far from true, no doubt; but they

would be little listened to except for their tendency to pessimism. There is a sense in which meditative souls "love darkness rather than the light." The moon, that is said to disorder the minds of men, makes the earth fairer with her silver than the sun with his gold. So the mysteriously potent evil gives us firm outlines and suggestive shadows possessed of almost irresistible fascination. But it is when we are tired of the day that we love the night. An era of intellectual illumination has closed for us; under the few stars left to us we ponder the work done.

It has just been said that about the beginning of the present century the Renaissance wave spent its force. It was a mighty wave, yet perhaps it had died away before then. Goethe, at any rate, combined in himself the whole philosophy of the Renaissance; Byron plucked from it the individualism it produced; Shelley etherealised it; Godwin added to it the ethics of government. For these, what have we now? The English poem is "In Memoriam;" the continental poet is Alfred de Musset; European philosophy is the cold system of Mill, the fierce despair of Schopenhauer, or the dregs of Hume's nonchalant scepticism-too nonchalant to take any name; and in economics the Malthusian theoryverily a " dismal science"-is either accepted as proved, or accepted as unrefuted, like Berkeley's theory of perception. It would have been strange if the result to economics had not been the same as that to literature and philosophy. A critical age is never a joyful age.

After the Revolution had compressed the lesson of human history into the deeds of a few months; after poets like Southey and Coleridge, and philosophers like Robert Owen and Fourier and St. Simon had seen their visions of earthly

paradise dispelled; after Godwin's "Political Justice" had thrilled the world with an enthusiasm comparable for intensity and brief duration only to electricity;-after this, men were prepared to listen to what such a man as Malthus had to say to them, with some patience, and even encouragement. The perfectibility, either of the poetical state of nature or of the highest civilisation, was declared to be an idea utterly chimerical. We were said to be hastening, not to social harmony, and wealth, and ease, but to over-population, and starvation, and misery. Blind, indeed, had we been, priding ourselves on productive powers, forgetting that only some produce, and that the possibility of production has bounds, while every being that draws the breath of life is of necessity a consumer. Certain commodities we have been rather proud of producing-children-we were to produce no longer ad libitum; we were rather to check the begetting of them. Since the days of Plato how much invention had been wasted in contriving the hatching of every egg that looked goodly! Undeterred by the failure of all such inventions, Plato's especially, Malthus proposed an artificial-or, at least, a hitherto neglected mode of regulating marriage and the whole relation of the sexes. He showed us, for a picture of society, the board spread by Nature for her favourites by a kind of predestination; but to this board some came hungry, and were turned away to die. The Mirza Bridge rocked with the load of human beings trampling across it. At the entrance sat Death, and snatched innocent babes from brothers and sisters, or gave them load of disease they sank under ere they had travelled far. The crowd could only proceed by launching the old and infirm from the other end into the yawning