the hand is carried by a mobile-jointed handle that constitutes the limb. In the inferior fish, as the lamprey, and in serpents, the limbs disappear, and the animal is really reduced to a vertebral column furnished with ribs.

The philosophic naturalist can rise to a conception still more general. These bones, these hard parts, the sole objects of study hitherto, have they all the importance that has been ascribed to them? Their hardness, their unalterability, the distinctness of their forms, facile to describe and reproduce by drawing, have they not induced naturalists to attribute to them an exaggerated importance? Are they so constant as is asserted, and is not the deposition of the calcareous salts that hardens them often an accidental fact, a secondary circumstance? The cyclostamous fish, (lampreys, lampfish, myxons,) are they not entirely destitute of a skeleton, while in turtles the skin itself becomes hard? Do we not see the clavicle wholly wanting in some animals, (porcupines, hares, rabbits, and Guinea pigs?) We find a bone in the diaphragm of the camel, the llama, and the hedgehog. These examples, given, with many others, by Professor Charles Rouget, would lead to the conception of an animal type composed only of the elementary woor of which the cellular, muscular, and osseous tissues are merely transformations. An animal would then be reduced to a digestive cavity surrounded by a muscular sac provided with appendices, as the plant is reduced to an axis bearing leaves. This is the highest abstraction to which the naturalist can rise, and the animal, like the vegetable, would be represented by a single type, that of the organized being.

The ulterior progress of botany, of zoology, of paleontology, comparative anatomy, and embryology will scatter all clouds, for each of these sciences contributes its part to the solution of these great questions. A new horizon appears to the view of naturalists, the doctrine of the fixedness of species is shaken; no one still believes that they have all descended, each, from a primordial pair. Darwin shows that they constantly tend to modification, and he is not afraid to utter the bold idea that the ideal type of Goethe may well be the real type of which the entire animal kingdom is the infinitely varied realization. Imagination recoils before such a conception; it refuses to believe that even myriads of ages have power to modify to this

degree the posterity of a single organized being; yet the bare enunciation of this hypothesis shows how profoundly the idea of unity in variety is impressed upon the thoughts of all naturalists really worthy of the name.

Art. III.-THE EMOTIONAL ELEMENT IN HEBREW

TRANSLATION.

[SECOND ARTICLE.]

THE DIVINE MEMORY.

THE emotional element in Hebrew translation is often lost through a fear, sometimes an unconscious fear, of what is called anthropopathism, or the ascribing to Deity the affections and mental exercises of humanity. The later Jewish commentators and translators were much influenced in this way. The men of the old Rabbinical school, such as Abenezra, Maimonides, and others, excelled in learning most men of those times, whether Jewish or Christian, but they had lost the spirit of their old Scriptures. The truth is, their new-found philosophy had made them a little ashamed of the Hebrew style, so bold and so uncompromising in its outward or phenomenal adaptation to the mind of all men, of every nation, every class, and every age. Philo had first taught them to seek a vail for some of its bald literalisms. The Talmudists, although they had little or no fellowship with the philosophy of Philo, shared the same feeling in respect to the Scriptures. The later commentators, of whom we have spoken, had still more of it. Wonderfully exact were they as guardians of the sacred text, trustworthy in the highest degree as lexicographers and lexical translators, careful to the extreme in their targumistic or traditionary interpretations, and, therefore, are we the more surprised when we find in them occasional deviations from the bold and sublime literalism of their own venerated leshon qodesh, or "holy tongue." It is this fear of anthropopathism to which their new philosophical studies seem to have made them peculiarly sensitive. Hence, God cannot "speak to Moses," as he does, or seems to

do, in the old text of the law; he cannot "dwell," literally, "in the tents of Shem;" he does not come down to see what the children of men are doing" in the plain of Babel, as though he were ignorant of the design of these bold tower builders. This might be offensive to the Platonizing followers of Philo among themselves, or it might expose their Scriptures to the cavil of the learned infidel, and, therefore, these philosophic Rabbis, who "feared the Lord while they served other gods," who revered Moses while they swore by Aristotle and the Arabian schoolmen, interposed the shekinah in such passages, though with little conception of its profound import, or an angel, or some voice, or attribute, or physical power of Deity, thereby marring not only the emotional power, but that deep theology which is only found by adhering most closely to the divinely designed literalism of the text.

All translators* have been more or less affected in this way. Sometimes it may have hardly risen to consciousness, or it may have been more of a feeling than a thought distinctly formed, and yet the effect is very manifest. Idiomatic expressions especially suffer in such a translation. The offensive style seems to be avoided, by smoothing over the peculiarity of language, if we may so describe it, leaving no trace of anything but the general and more philosophical form of the thought, as it would be called.

And yet nothing is gained by this, even on the theory of such translators; for their own amendments are but the substi

*There is no version of the Pentateuch in the main more faithful and accurate than the one made by the Arabian Jew, commonly called Arabs Erpenianus, from the manuscript having been first brought to light by the learned Orientalist Erpenius. Its exact date is not known, but it is doubtless very old. It is literal even to a fault, and yet we are now and then surprised by just such cases of accommodation as are above mentioned. The translator manifests none of this squeamishness in regard to any of the most minute details of the ceremonial law; but in the manner of its communication, and in the setting forth of the divine appearances, he seems afraid, at times, to let it speak for itself. This is the more strange, because elsewhere the literal version is all the more clear and beautiful from its being made into a cognate tongue, suffering easily an exact transfer of idiom. As passages in which this especially appears, may be mentioned Genesis ix, 27, Exodus xxix, 45, 46. In the latter passage instead, of saying, as Moses has it, "I will dwell in the midst of the children of Israel," this Arabian Jew translates, "I will cause my light to dwell in the tents of Israel." The Targums are affected in a similar way: especially the later ones.

tution of one anthropopathism for another, and the Bible still abounds in others, whose bold and direct expression no artifice of translation and no generalizing of language can avoid. Thus, to take a very prominent example involving even the whole essence of this mighty question, God is said to remember, and even to be reminded. It is a mode of speech that meets us often and in its most direct form. This faculty, so very human, is ascribed to Deity, sometimes directly, sometimes as implied in the language of prayer. There is nothing in the Scriptures. more touching: "Thus saith the Lord; I remember thee, the fondness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown." Jer. ii, 2. Here is not only memory, but the pathetic particularity of memory, the tender reminding circumstance. It was when God was alone with his people "in the barren wilderness" it was "in the day of their espousals." In the similar mnemonic appeal, Genesis ix, 15, there is an ineffable sublimity connected with its deep pathos. The Infinite comes down to the finite human sphere. God vails himself in human concep tions. He takes not only our voice, our words, but our thought, our feeling, not simulated merely, but truly thought, truly felt, even as we think and feel. With deep sincerity, as man talking to man in solemn covenant, he appoints an express memorial, a cheering mnemonic sign, made constant in the very heart of the visible nature, and assuring us that we should never be forgotten: "And the bow shall be in the cloud, and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth."

Not less wondrous is the representation than the ineffable truth which it presents. Shall we say that this is a mere simulated condescension? Did Moses believe that Deity thus truly talked to men, thus thinking as they thought, and conceiving after their manner of conception? He who wrote this knew that God was infinite, as well as Spinoza or the seven wise men of Oxford. The conception* that represented to him the idea was as vast, the emotion as living and as spiritual; for he had heard the voice from the I AM proclaiming his eternal, inde

* We mean by this the emotional conception, which is wholly independent of any science the same for Abraham, David, and Socrates, as for La Place.

pendent, unoriginated being. He knew that God was absolute, unconditioned, infinite; for the finite, the limited, ever must have form; but God is unrepresentable, transcending all form, all limitation in space or time. There is nothing like him in the heavens above, or in the earth beneath; the world in its totality can no more image him than any of the partial forms or energies of nature. All this is expressed in that wondrous precept given so many ages ago to the chosen people: "Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves, for ye saw no manner of similitude on the day when the Lord spake unto you in Horeb; take heed unto yourselves lest ye make the similitude of any figure, the likeness of anything on the earth, of anything that flieth in the air, of anything that is in the waters, and lest thou lift up thine eyes unto the heaven, and worship them, or the hosts thereof." Deut. iv, 15–19. He, too, who writes this of the covenant and the bow, and God's looking upon it to call to remembrance, is the same who first gave the world those sublime epithets, El Olam, El Shaddai, El Elion, Eternal, Almighty, Most High,-older than all time, stronger than all might, higher than all conceivable altitude, whether of knowledge, space, or rank. And did he feel no contradiction when he describes the eternal as thus speaking to the human conception, and through the human conception? Is the language real? That is, does it represent a real transaction, as real on the part of God as on the part of man? Or is it a pictorial condescension, a simulated accommodation to human weakness, even as a father talks to his young children in words and figures that are but the faintest reflex, or rather but the representative symbol, of his matured and manly thought. Even as thus received, revelation is still most precious. It assures us of a father's heart, though it be far away, and its eternal pulsations so faintly reach us though far-off telegraphic signals. Is it mere accommodation? Even then should we thankfully receive it as such, and be accommodated by it, taking it in that literal way which God has designed as best adapted to comfort us, not seeking to get above it, or saying it was made for a simpler and less philosophical age, or affecting in any way to be wise above what is written.

But may there not be, after all, a reality in it, a reality per se, a reality in its relation to the divine as well as the