tory, which seeks out, amidst the varying phenomena the ideals of nature, the creative thoughts of the Creator,-if we may so dare to say; which makes one feel that in the plan of nature order and beauty stand far above even its own glorious and unselfish utilitarianism. n; Did Aristotle know any thing about this part of natural history? We answer that the homologies of the different parts of the human frame did not entirely escape his observation and in the 11th chapter of the first book of his History of Animals he has some curious observations on the relations of its parts, comparing the upper and the lower, the fore and the hind, and the right and the left, respectively. But into the higher law of morphology, that which depends on a recognition of form as distinct from the end, he had no insight. This is strange, when we consider that no treatment of natural history was perhaps ever so well suited to bring out the exact issue raised by morphology as that which Aristotle pursued. In the Physics (lib. ii. c. 3) he had already laid down and defined the four kinds of causes which are to be inquired into. These are, as every one knows, first the material cause, as in the case of a statue, the brass; secondly, the formal cause, the idea and exemplar in the mind of the craftsman; thirdly, the efficient cause, as the craftsman himself; and lastly, the final cause, the end and object for which the statue was wrought. Now it is upon this classification of causes that Aristotle has mapped out his discussions on natural history; and it will be at once seen that such a division of the subject necessarily discriminates between the two branches of anatomy,-the teleological and the morphological,-that which has to do with the final, and that which has to do with the formal causes. The actual form of any given animal is, so to speak, the diagonal between these two causes; and thus the mode of discussion proposed by Aristotle invited almost of necessity an attempt to resolve the diagonal into its component forces. Moreover, Plato's doctrine of ideas had raised the same question, though in a yet more transcendental form; so that the existence or non-existence of morphology came inevitably before Aristotle. But, as we have seen, he never attained to any conception of the law of form in the animal structure; and in a passage in which the four causes are recapitulated by him in their application to zoology, he affirms shortly, and without any reason given, that the formal and final causes are in this case one and the same, * thus negativing the existence of the science in question. It would be unreasonable and absurd to blame Aristotle for not grasping the principle of morphological anatomy; but if any De Generat. Anim. lib. i. c. 1. defence were needed, it might be found in this, that he did not then know whether teleological reasonings alone were sufficient or insufficient to answer all the problems presented by the forms of animals; and until he knew that they were insufficient, he had no need to resort to any other principle. For, in fact, morphology has been discovered because teleology has been found insufficient, and has left a residual phenomenon which morphology alone can account for. Indeed, it must be admitted that as we can perhaps never feel sure that we know exhaustively all the purposes of a creature, or all the relations of organs to their purposes, the doctrine of morphology lies open to the objection of being supported only by arguments from our ignorance; so that with the knowledge of Aristotle, it would perhaps have been rash rather than praiseworthy to have invoked into the explanation of animal forms any other principle than that of final causes. He who compares the natural history of the moderns with that of the ancients, even in its most scientific development, will of course be struck with the vast advance made in the collection and comparison of facts, the correction of errors, and the improvement of the means and method of observation. But he will be struck too with another thought, which it will be well for him also to ponder, we mean, that almost all the great ultimate questions which presented themselves to the ancients present themselves to us also in nearly the same form, and with nearly the same difficulties attending their solution. Thus, for instance, the great question about the development of animal life and form, how far the need has gone before and caused the development, or the development has preceded and owed its origin to design,-the question, we mean, which has of late years been popularly raised by the Vestiges of Creation,— was familiar to the ancient naturalists; and there were among them, as among us, two parties, the one for and the other against what we may call the development theory. Thus Aristotle (De Partibus An. lib. i. c. 1) says that the first natural philosophers held, "that from water running into the body the stomach arose, and all the organs devoted to the reception of food; and that by the passage of the breath the nostrils were rent open." From this view he expresses his dissent, and sums up his conception of the matter in the very Aristotelian remark, "that birth is for the sake of being, and not being for the sake of birth." But the debate still survived, and reappears amongst the Roman naturalists. Lucretius has discussed the subject, in a way which might at first sight be confounded with the views of the Stagyrite, because he does not put the use before, but after, the creation of the organ; but the motive with which this is done is essentially different, because Lucretius conceives the organ to have preceded the use, not by design and with a view to the use, but by accident only, the use being a thing purely casual: "Nil ideo quoniam natum est in corpore, ut uti Lib. iv. 835-843. * The modern doctrine of development tells us, as has been often said, that we are only fishes in a higher stage, and that we each have been a fish ourselves. Now Plutarch has a story which forcibly recalls this statement of the modern doctrine; for he tells us that Anaximander taught that mankind were originally born of fishes; and that when they had been nourished up and became able to help themselves,-reached a proper stage of development, to use more modern language, they were then cast forth, and took to the land; and that for this reason the philosopher affirmed fishes to be the father and mother of mankind, and on that ground forbade the eating of them. We wonder whether it would be possible to discover the secret author of the Vestiges by a general invitation of all the savans of the country to a white-bait dinner. The spontaneous generation of animals is another of those ultimate questions in natural science of which we have spoken. Every schoolboy, at least of the type with which Lord Macaulay was familiar, remembers the recipe which Virgil gives in the fourth Georgic for the production of bees where the hive may have lost its usual colony, whereby a brood of insects is raised from the blood of the slaughtered heifer: "Interea teneris tepefactus in ossibus humor Georgics, iv. 308. It is impossible to read these lines and not to recall the acari which Mr. Crosse saw, or thought he saw, developing on the stone in his galvanic battery; and the question raised by the two narratives is identically the same. If one may judge from rather a brief passage in his Treatise on the Soul (lib. ii. c. 4, § 2), Aristotle did not deny the possibility of spontaneous genera * Plutarch, Conviv. Disput. lib. viii. quest. 8, § 4, edit. Wytt. tion, but seems to have confined it to the lower and rudimentary orders, to animals, in short, which he conceived as without any powers of reproduction. Many other instances might be adduced to confirm the observation that the ultimate questions of natural science remain the same; and to show that though more powerful weapons may be wielded, and more numerous troops engaged, the battle still rages round the same positions as it did in the times of Aristotle and Lucretius. This observation on the identity of the ultimate questions of natural science to Aristotle and to ourselves, is not without its bearing on any inquiry into the possible limits either of that science or of the human mind. No doubt in every case, whether it be theology or natural science, the inquiry into the limits is an a priori one, because the limitations result not from the nature of the object, but of the subject-from the smallness, not of the thing, but of the mirror; so that in the end the question, What are the limits of knowledge? resolves itself into this other, What are the limits of our powers of knowing? Nevertheless valuable suggestions towards the solution of this a priori question may be gathered from the experience of mankind: wherever we find something on which the successive waves of science, the strongest efforts of man, have been beating for ages, without making the least advance, or creating the least motion, we may begin to suspect (we say not that we may conclude) that there we have something which can never be passed by the human mind with its now powers, that there we have one of those limits where God has said to the human mind, as to the sea, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed." ART. III.-MICHELET'S LIFE OF RICHELIEU. Richelieu et la Fronde. Par M. J. Michelet. 8vo. Paris, 1859. THIS work is the last which has appeared of M. Michelet's amusing historical notices. It includes the latter years of the reign of Louis XIII. and the beginning of that of Louis XIV., that is to say, the administrations of Richelieu and Mazarin. Those thirty years (from 1629 to 1659) are perhaps the most important in French history. In the course of them France was raised from a second-rate power nearly to her present position, her army became the first in the world, and the supremacy of her formidable rival, Austria, was destroyed, apparently for ever. In spite, however, of the glory and the promise of this period, no Englishman can rise from its records without disgust and depression. Under Richelieu it was the reign of tyranny, hatred, fear, and treachery between every class, and almost between every individual. The king, the queen, and the queenmother, deceived, distrusted, and detested each other, and they all joined in hating Richelieu. M. Michelet is not an historian; he is a describer of scenes. He instinctively seizes on all that is amusing, and his picturesque language fixes his narratives in the memory. But his series of pictures, like an historical gallery, is intelligible only to those who are familiar with the persons and the lives of the originals. We therefore think it advisable to prefix a short summary of the events which preceded those which are contained in the volume before us. Queen Marie de Medicis was, say the historians of the time, neither sufficiently grieved nor sufficiently surprised by the assassination of Henri IV. She had never deserved nor obtained his affection, and she now looked forward to a long period of power and of freedom; for the little Louis XIII. was only ten years old. Her expectations were deceived. Her weak and vicious government revived the pretensions of the upper classes, restrained for a time by Henri IV. and his minister Sully. The money which Sully had accumulated was squandered on the princes and nobles, in the vain endeavour to suppress insurrection; and seven years had not elapsed before Louis XIII., at the instigation of De Luynes, exiled his mother, and caused her favourite minister Concini, Maréchal d'Ancre, to be murdered within the walls of her palace. She was followed into exile by the comptroller of her household. Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu. Born in 1585, he was at this time thirty-two years of age. The church was not his choice. He had already embraced a military career, when in 1605 his elder brother, the Bishop of Luçon, retired into a convent. The family could not afford to lose a bishopric, and Armand was compelled to abandon the sword for the crosier. He spent two years in study at the Sorbonne, and was consecrated to the see of Luçon before his twenty-second year. Early in life he showed consciousness of his powers, and eagerness to exercise them. He first attracted attention by his eloquence in the States-General of 1614. His speech in favour of the royal authority and of the regency recommended |