Still crooning o'er its secret like a spell, Of life prosaic, and therefore thou wert Thy bread uncertain, thine ambrosia sure: This low-lived world might lift her head again, Could she but rear a race of such poor men!" We must find space for AN AFTER-THOUGHT. "There's no repose within this optic sphere; The world is like the soul, though not so fair. The young moon waxes, wanes, and follows Dear Earth is hastened in her fond career; same kind of ends in view as the wiser teachers of the mathematics. It is not the mathematics, but a mathematical way of thinking, not natural history, but a classific way of thinking, and not natural philosophy, but an inductive way of thinking, that are to be shed into the mind of the general student." Entering upon the consideration of the has been gradually acquired, our author manner in which a knowledge of nature gives a full and critical exposition of the view propounded by Auguste Comte in La Philosophie Positive, of which the following is an epitome, not taken, however from the same, but from a later essay : "According to that vivacious, far-sighted, and muscular critic, there are, and in a manner must be, three principal epochs in the growth of each science, and of all the sciences together: the childish religious, the boyish metaphysical, and the manly positive epochs of development. "It need scarcely be added that this great writer considers the positive or Baconian era as the consummation of all inquiry, and thinks the method of discovery by observation and induction the perfection of philosophy, destined one day to carry humanity to the hights of attaina ble bliss. It must be avowed in passing, and merely avowed, that this appears to be at once an error of fact and a breach of the very methodology which is exalted. There is surely a fourth epoch of scientific method beginning every where to dawn upon the world. It is preparing as we have been accustomed to think, to combine the descendentalism of Plato and the idealists with the ascendental processes of Bacon and the sensationists, and likewise to render the long-awaited union worthy of mankind, by shedding into it the spirit of Christ and his disciples. As a fine generalization of the past history of the purely ascendental sciences, however, the doctrine of Comte is most important the private labors of the task, to trace the evoand interesting, and it will always well repay lutions of the law in the genesis of any science in particular, or of the sciences considered as an organic whole. To be brief, since the subject is really beyond our present bounds, this historical speculator's three ages might have been distinguished by a more reverent and affectionate critic, as the superstitious, the fictitious, and the real.' "Facts are the body of science, and the idea of those facts is its spirit. In order that the poet, the artist, the man of letters, the politician, the professional person, or the man of general culture should become possessed of essential science, and crown himself with the very flower and fruitage of the long year of investigation, it is not necessary to enter the observatory, the laboratory, the museum, or the dissecting-room. Nor must he peruse the best text-books. The superficial volumes of popular science will not serve his purpose. It is another and a new class of works that is wanted. These must be brief and sculpturesque. They must at once lay bare the spirit of science after science; they must exhibit the ideas of the sciences and illustrate these ideas by as few and as principal facts as possible, containing shapely principles, and not a huddle of elementary observations. They must be metaphysical, rather than phy-ing. He starts with the assertion—“It is sical treatises. Their authors must have the the inalienable prerogative of man to pray THE FINITE AND THE INFINITE. Errors appear to us to run through his metaphysical treatise, The Finite and the Infinite, though we have there the fruits of more matured and more reverent think richer far than any which she has yet presented in the temple of Divine Truth. The book of Nature and the volume of Revelation are inscribed by the same hand; they are different thoughts of the same Supreme Intelligence. The honest and reverential study of the one can not be opposed to the honest and reverential study of the other. Yet a foolish antagonism has often sprung up between the cultivators of these two great departments of knowledge; the theologian, as though he secretly mistrusted the Bible, has often looked with suspicion on the advance of natural science; and many a philosopher, as some science began to shape itself from the chaos of early observations, has hurled it against the statements of divine Revelation; but those redoubtable buttresses have remained unshaken by the puerile attack, while not unfrequently the weapon has recoiled upon that infidelity which exult to God. It is the royal condition on | which he wears the crown of nature; although the condition is ill-fulfilled, and his glory is therefore dim. In every clime and in every age, however, he builds himself an altar; nor is there any man, be his metaphysical creed what it may, or be he ever so far from God in the spirit of his mind, but sometimes utters himself in willing or involuntary prayers." Believing that man perceives the Almighty directly, and not through any conscious or unconscious demonstration, he attempts to solve the metaphysical problem of how this comes to pass. Starting with the idea of Me, he inquires what is the opposite of this idea; for each idea involves its antithesis, as beauty supposes deformity, unity multiplicity, and so on; and this he conceives not to be the non ego of the Germans, for, says he, "Non-me is no more the logical antithesis of Me, than nonbeauty is that of beauty, or than non-uni-ingly flung it. Where, moreover, science ty is that of unity. The opposite involved in Me is Thou. The idea of Me is grounded in being, and doing; and its true antithesis must also be grounded in being, and doing;" in fact, must be like Me, a person. And Me is finite; Thou, therefore, must be infinite. Such our author surmises to be "an analysis of the genuine and unfallen self-consciousness of man," exhibiting "the rational ground and secret process of that sacred intuition, whereby he beholds Him whom no man hath seen, or can see, with the eye of sense, or that of the finite understanding." After showing that the mere sensationalist and the mere idealist are alike liable to forget God, and to disbelieve in prayer, he enters on the controversy as to the perception of matter. Into this we shall not follow him, nor yet into his attempt at elucidation of the reason why man intuitively sees and believes in the world of sensation, and that he immediately refers that world to God as its continual Cre has been recognized as a handmaid of religion, its only province has been generally thought to be that of lifting the soul "from nature up to nature's God," by demonstrating the power, wisdom, and beneficence of that Being who (as we believe on totally different grounds) spake by prophets and apostles and the incarnate Word; or, perhaps natural science has been valued as sometimes affording a beautiful illustration, or a striking simile, whereby to enforce some revealed truth. Now, beyond this province, we believe there lies one as yet scarcely trodden by human footsteps, but which when culti vated may yield rich harvests to the glory of God as well as the service of man. The two books of nature and of revelation are not merely written by the same hand, they are to a certain extent written in the same style; both are marked by a wondrous variety yet with a certain unity pervading it, in both we observe the frequent repetition of typical ideas, in both We think there is some obscurity we note the same absence of scientific arof terms, if not of ideas, though we admire rangement. Any department of nature the attempt, and heartily accept the con- will illustrate our meaning. We select clusion which he has expressed by the the group of the Mammalia. We find the metaphor: Nature is the spontaneous earth covered with different species of an. word of God, being spoken, and that ac-imals resembling one another in their way cording to rhythmical law like the speech of poets." ator. Without feeling disrespectfully towards the Bridgewater Treatises, or despising the study of natural theology, we do believe that science has offerings in store of nourishing their young, but we do not find them classified in nature. One Continent is not inhabited by those that ru minate and another by those that gnaw. The tiger in an Indian jungle is allied to the cat on our hearth-rug; the antelopes of South-Africa to the Persian gazelle, or the Alpine chamois. The ox, the weasel, and the rabbit take up their abode in the same field. Or, to look at the subject in reference to time instead of space, the mammalian type first meets our eye at Swanage or Stonesfield among the débris of the oolitic period, then come mammoths and elephants, and megatheria of all sorts, now extinct, and the rich zoölogical treasures of Kirkdale or Montmartre, till among the luxuriance of a recent fauna, man himself, the noblest of the mammalia, appears on the stage of this world's history. Placed in the midst of all this apparent confusion of animals, the zoologist has carefully to collect his facts, before he can hope to generalize, or to discern typical resemblances, and build up a system; and then he meets with the whale and the bat to show how untrue to nature are the sharp lines of his classification. Just so in God's word, we have here a promise, there a tender exhortation, a doctrine lies embedded in a narrative or an argument, a precept is conveyed in a burst of poetry or a group of proverbs. But in vain do we search the Bible for any body of divinity; for any theological system; we do not find one part devoted to the office of God in the scheme of Redemption, another part to what is necessary on the side of man; we do not find a definition of original sin, or an exposition of the Trinity. The materials are all there, from which the student may frame his own classification, and draw his own lines of definition, which after all will be but a faulty mapping out of divine truth. The method of God in the two books of nature and revelation being the same, our methods of investigation must be similar. The canons of interpretation applied to the one must stand in close relationship to those suitable for the other. There must be the same careful collation of facts, the same distrust of our own bypotheses, the same humble tracing of the Divine plan, the same perception that a name is not an explanation, and that a good theory must embrace every known instance and be susceptible of modification so as to embrace any which further research may bring to light. The dangers to which the students of nature and of the Bible are exposed are almost identical, as any one may see to an extent that will probably surprise him, if he will write out, as we once did, the second chapter of Bacon's Novum Organum, that on Idols, changing every word that relates to natural philosophy to an analogous one belonging to divinity, and substituting some theological error in place of each scientifie one adduced by way of illustration. It will be advantageous, therefore, for the student of natural science to know the canons most fitted for interpreting Scripture, and for the student of the revealed Word to know the canons best fitted for interpreting nature. Indeed, as the deductions of physical science are for the most part less liable to be affected by the prejudices and feelings, the hopes and fears of their investigator, and are more susceptible of direct proof, it is to be anticipated that the true methods of discovery will be more accurately, or, at any rate, more generally recognized in that direction; and that through understanding the manifestation of God in external objects, a man will become doubly prepared to read aright the incomparably superior manifestation of Himself in his written word. But as yet this is an almost untried path. From the Edinburgh Review. THE CELTS AND THE GERMAN S.* would not have been perceptibly affected if its western, like its eastern, extremity had been closed by an isthmus. IN attempting to reproduce a distinct | the shores of the Pontus; and thus Euriand precise impression of the social and pides speaks of the Black Sea and Mount intellectual life of the ancient Greeks and Atlas, as the proverbial extremities of the Romans, it is necessary to keep steadily known. world to the east and west. Even in view the narrowness of their geogra- the cautious and skeptical Aristotle bephical horizon, and the slow rate at which lieved that the sea beyond the Pillars of it was enlarged by commerce, conquest, Hercules was unfit for navigation. Pracand scientific discovery. At the time of tically, the ancients regarded the MediHerodotus, the Greeks had, in Asia, be-terranean as a lake, and their navigation come acquainted with a considerable part of the Persian empire; and, in Africa, the Nile had carried them into the interior of Egypt; but to the west and north their knowledge did not reach much beyond the shores of the Mediterranean. With the chief part of Europe, the Greeks of that period were wholly unacquainted; they had never sailed beyond the Straits of Gibraltar; the western shores of Spain | and France, Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia, were as unknown to them as America or Australia. The great hero, Hercules, who was conceived in the light of a civilizer and benefactor of mankind; as destroying wild beasts, as punishing tyrant, as opening roads over impassable regions, was believed to have made the Straits of Gibraltar the term of his expedition to the far west, and to have there erected two columns, as memorials of his extreme course. These pillars, beyond which, according to Pindar, every thing was inaccessible and unknown, were converted, by the rationalizing tendencies of the later Greeks, into natural objects; into rocks, promontories, or islands. The early Greeks, however, understood the Pillars of Hercules in a literal sense, as they are represented on the pillar dollars of old and new Spain. The same hero was sup posed to have erected similar columns on The voyage of the Argonauts is purely fabulous, and no inferences can be drawn from it respecting the history of commerce or geographical discovery; but it is certain that the Greeks of Asia Minor had, at an early period, sailed into the Black Sea, and Hellenic colonies had begun to be planted on its coasts so early as the seventh century before Christ. The Cimmerian Bosporus and the Palus Mæotis are mentioned by Aschylus; and an epigram, attributed to Simonides, alludes to the distant Tanais. Herodotus was well acquainted with this river, (the Don,) which he describes as flowing into the Lake Mæotis, and as dividing Europe from Asia. But the Caspian Sea lay beyond the range of the distinct vision of the Greeks. Artemidorus, of Ephesus, a geographer who lived about 100 B.C., declared that the country east of the Tanais was unexplored. Even after the expedition of Alexander, the Caspian was believed to be a gulf of the Northern Ocean, with which it communicated by a long narrow channel. The Greeks were ignorant of the Volga: this river first occurs under the name of the Rha, in the writings of geographers and historians who lived under the Roman em. pire. Pliny, indeed, informs us that, with regard to the Palus Mæotis, his contemporaries believed it to be connected with the Great Northern Sea. Some thought that it was a gulf of the ocean, while others held it to be a lagoon, separated from the sea by a narrow strip of land. So imperfectly acquainted were the Greeks the frozen sea; he did not profess to have reached this island; he stated, however, that it was composed of a substance which was neither earth, air, nor water, but was something compounded of all three, and resembled the pulmo marinus, a mollusca found in the Mediterranean. Of this substance, he asserted that he had seen a specimen. He likewise gave an account of amber being found in a northern island, opposite a shore of the ocean inhabited by the Guttones. He added that, on his return, he had sailed along the whole coast of northern Europe, between Gadeira and the Tanais. Herodotus is ignorant of the Alps as a chain of mountains: he calls the Alpis a river flowing northwards from Upper Italy, and falling into the Danube; he likewise describes Pyrene as a town near the sources of the Danube. It was, he says, unknown, in his time, whether Europe was bounded by sea on the west; he expressly states that he had been una- The criticisms of Polybius and Strabo ble to ascertain this fact from the testi-prove conclusively that Pytheas was to a mony of any eye-witness, notwithstanding great extent an impostor, and that the his endeavors to obtain information on account of his voyage to these remote rethe subject. Polybius, the consistent gions is entitled to little or no credit. enemy of exaggeration and imposture, declares that, in his time, (about 150 B.C.,) nothing was known of the northern parts of Europe, lying between Narbo, in Gaul, to the west, and the river Tanais, to the east. The prevailing belief of that period was that the ocean stretched across the north of Europe, from the neighborhood of the Caspian and the Sea of Azoff, to the Straits of Gibraltar. That the belief in a circumfluous ocean, connecting the northern shores of India with Germany, continued to hold its ground for some time longer, appears from a curious anecdote preserved by Pliny and Mela. Q. Metellus Celer, when pro-consul of Cisalpine Gaul, in 62 B.C., received as a present from the king of the Suevi, some Indians, who were said to have sailed from India for purposes of trade, and to have been carried by contrary winds to Germany. The Suevi dwelt on the eastern bank of the Rhine; and their donation must have been sent to Metellus across the Alps. The name of Britain seems to have been first made known to the Greeks by Pytheas, a Massilian navigator, who lived at or soon after the time of Alexander the Great. Pytheas published an account of a voyage which he declared himself to have made along the north-western coasts • of Europe. He stated that he had visited Britain, and traversed the whole of it by land; he likewise gave an account of a marvelous island named Thule, situated six days' sail to the north of Britain, near * See Livy, xl. 21, Mela, ii. 2. The name and existence of Thule were equally the invention or Pytheas; they represented nothing real, although attempts were made in later times to invest Thule with a geographical character; and his statement that he had coasted along the north of Europe from the river Don to Cadiz, shows that his accounts rested not on fact, but on the fanciful errors received in his own day. It can not be considered as certain that he even sailed as far as Britain. Gosselin, indeed, after a careful analysis of the supposed facts reported by Pytheas, comes to the conclusion that he never visited that island, but that he collected either at Gades, or at some other port frequented by the Carthaginians, some vague notions on the northern seas and regions of Europe, and that he passed them off upon his countrymen for his own discoveries. Herodotus declares that he has no knowledge of the northern river Eridanus, or of the Cassiterid Islands, from which amber and tin were imported into Greece. He believes, nevertheless, that the two articles in question came from the extremities of the earth. These extremities of the earth were, doubtless, the southern shore of the Baltic and Cornwall; from which places the Greeks were supplied with these commodities, through the agency of some intermediate trade. Timæus, the historian, who wrote about 250 B.C., stated that tin was brought from an island within six days' sail of Britain; Polybius knew that tin was produced in the Britannic Islands; and Posidonius, about fifty years after him, stated that it |