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We have only this week learned that an Italian Protestant magazine is published in London , and appears to have lived six years under the title of jJEco di Savonarola . ¦ - Three numbers were sent to us , wherefore we cannot conceive ; surely not because we can be supposed to sympathize with its tone ? The very first article we read bore this attractive title , Christianity from the scientific point of view , and the opening sentences declare that the article js not addressed to " apostles of incredulity / ' whom the writer ( with modest sagacity ) says it would be a waste of time to attempt to convince ; adding that " doubts do not arise in their minds simply from their weakness of intellect , but also from their vanity and corrupted hearts
-non nascendo in essi il dubbio da sola pocchezza d'intettetto , ma bensi da vanith e corruzionedel cuore I" How long is this injurious and irreligious cant to continue ? How long are the preachers of a religion of charity thus to continue their uncharitableness to all opponents ? For , observe this dilemma : either theologians believe that heterodoxy is the consequence of a depraved morality and corrupted heart , or they do not believe it . If they do not believe it , how contemptible they must be to utter it ; if they do believe it , how inexpressibly narrow-minded and how incompetent to teach others 1 To think of men who have lived iand thought , to whom the great mysteries of existence have ever suggested the notion of their
helpless ignorance and incompetence , to whom the doubts and difficulties of belief must have been made familiar by daily and almost hourly experience , declaring that those who differ from them in creed differ because their hearts are perverted by vanity and bad impulses ! The man whose ignorance of human nature is so profound as that , ought to be ashamed to set upas a teacher ; the man whose nature is so ungenerous as that , ought to be ashamed to call himself religious . Narrow hearts and narrow brains may preach theology , they will never found religion ! The article which opens with the sentences we are combating" is written by oneMape * , and its gross stupidity is such as we might anticipate . The writer undertakes to show that Science only confirms the language of ^ Scripture . As a specimen , what think you of this ? In the Mosaic account light is createdjbefore the sun , and Signor
Mapei considers this a proof of the divine inspiration ; for if Moses had not written under the impulse of Eternal Wisdom , he would not have written that which must have been so repugnant to his ideas , as to him the sun must have seemed the source of all light ! Without pausing here to inquire whence Sigrior Mapei learned that Moses imagined the sun to be the source of all light , we pass to his explanation . Science , he informs us , has proved the truth of Genesis , by proving that light does not emanate from the sun , " but exists in the atmosphere ( esiste nelV atmosfera ) , and the solar disc exercises an influence on it by setting the molecules in mo ^ tion . " We leave this theory of light to Baden Powell or Brewster . Meanwhile who does not see that if the solar disc is requisite to cause the molecular movement named light , the blunder in Genesis remains unexplained as it did before ?
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The origin of The Men and Women of France , reviewed by us last week , turns out to be , as we insisted , purely French . The work is . a translation of Arsons Houbsaye ' s collected sketches . Why the authorship was concealed it is difficult to divine , since the original is neither rare nor inaccessible . . Of literary gossip we have two or three stray fragments worth setting down . The one is , that Tennyson is busy with a new poem , of a totally different order from any he has yet published , unless the fragment of the Morte d * Arthur be counted ; another is , that the gay and brilliant author of The Bachelor of the Albany has nearly completed a new novel of a philosophical and satirical turn . Thackeray , whose historical novel was to have been published last Christmas , has not finished much more than half of his work , so that even Easter will not smile a welcome to its welcome pages ! For a long while the Memoires of George Sand have been eagerly expected , but no sign is yet given of their appearance . It will calm your eagerness somewhat , perhaps , if we tell you , which we can confidently , that these Mtimoires will contain no confessions . Like Goethe , she has written her life in her works . All she has seen , thought , suffered , has found its expression under imaginary forms . More explicit she will not be . To transmute experience into poetic forms is the office of an Artist ; but to use experience as afriandise for curiosity is what few Artists would condescend to . She is not of the few . The idea of writing Memoires at
all was suggested by her discovering , among some old family papers , a vast num ber of her father ' s letters addressed to her mother during the campaigns of Napoleon , to one of whose brothers her father was aid-de-camp . These will be given in ewtenso , and are said to paint a vivid picture of the times . George Sand will also describe her childhood , spent mainly tinder the eye of a grandmother , who tried to remedy the misfortune of her having come into the world a girl , when a boy was wanted , by " making a man of her ; " she will tell us of her studies , and her dreams , —in short , she will trace for us some outline of the history of her mind . As to the rest , she may say with Mdlle . Delaunay , je me peins en buste . Worthy of a remwk is the fact , that Dumas and George Sand ,
opposite in all things but celebrity , should both be writing their Memoirs at the same time , and both be filling the earlier volumes with elaborate biographies of their fathers , who were both high in Napoleon ' s favour . But Dumas has been urged by the temptation of book-making quite as much as by filial love : a fact we see illustrated in the subsequent volumes •—four and five are just out—wherein every person is seiz « d on as a pretext for digression . Let us add , also , that Dumas has just given us the second volume of his gay and facile Olympe deClevest a very pleasant novel , worth your reading .
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THE EABTH AND MAN . The Earth and Man : or Physical Geography in its Eolation to the History of Mankind * Slightly abridged from the work of Arnold Guyot . , „ ' . J . W . Parker and Son . Looking abroad upon the vast complexity of phenomena , apparently unconnected , which Nature presents in ever-renewing variety to our bewildered gaze , what a deep feeling of man ' s magnificent endowments , and of the grand simplicity of Creation , moves the heart , as we reflect that all those varied phenomena are reducible to a few constant laws , and will doubtless , in the " process of the suns , " be reduced to one law . At a first glance how hopeless it must seem to attempt the discovery of such , a comulex mvsterv ! Yet Philosophy—which , as Plato profoundly says , is
nothing but the search after the One in the Many—by directing its earnest gaze only at Resemblances , at last is enabled to find the Ariadne-clue to the great labyrinth , and to move amidst the multiplicity of phenomena with a sure and steady pace . Just what the phenomena of . Nature are , on a grand scale , to the uninstructed mind , a Map is to all but scientific geographers . Cast your eyes upon a Map of the World , and imagine what a hopeless task it would seem to interpret the significance of its endless variety of lines , indentations , elevations , its rivers , seas , mountains , plains , and waving coasts ! Yet , as surel y as this world was not the nanrice of Chance—an accident in the aimless life of Chaos—as surely as
it and all that lives upon it are subordinate to Law , so surely are those varieties of dotted lines significant of some great processes m JN ature , and needful therefore to be understood by Science . Let this Map be studied closely . The eyes of one man , of one generation of men , will not suffice ; the film of death will intercept the reading before a page in that book is clearly read;—but what one man cannot dp , Humanity can do . After thousands of observations , there appear amidst the irregularities which at first seemed accidental , certain features of resemblance and a general disposition of their parts due to the presidence of some formative Law ; let us see what these resemblances may mean .
" Lord Bacon , the restorer of the physical sciences , first opened the way by remarking , that the southern extremities of the two worlds terminate in a point , turned towards the Southern Ocean , while they go on widening towards the north . " " After him , Reinhold Forster , the scientific and judicious companion of Captain Cook in his second voyage round the world , took up the observation , and developed it to a much greater extent . He points out substantially three analogies , or coincidences , in the structure of the continents . ' and rock
" The first is , that the southern points of all the continents are high y and seem to be the extremities of mountain belts , which come from far in the interior , and break off abruptly at the shore of the ocean . America terminates in the rocky precipices of Cape Horn , the last representatives of the already broken chain of the Andes ; Africa ends in the Cape of Good Hope , with its high plateaus and its Table Mountain , rising from the bosom of the ocean to a height of more than 4000 feet ; Asia , in tlie peninsula of the Deccan , sends out the chain of the Ghauts to form the high rocks of Cape Comorin ; Australia , lastly , presents in its southern extremity , at Cape Southeast , Van Diemen ' Land , the Bame-abrupt and massive
character . " A second analogy is , that the continents have , east of the southern points , a large island or a group of islands more or less considerable . America has the Falkland Islands ! Africa has Madagascar and the volcanic islands which surround it ; Asia has Ceylon and Australia , the two great islands of New Zealand , and the numerous groups of Australasia . " A third character of configuration , common to the continents , is a deep bend of their western side towards the interior of the mass . Their flanks are , as it were , on this side , hollowed into a vast gulf . In America , tlio concave summit of this inflection is indicated by the position of Arica , at tho foot of the high Cordillera of Bolivia . In Africa , tho Gulf of Guinea expresses more strongly still this characteristic feature . It is more feebly marked in Asia by tho Gulf of Cambaye , and the Indo-Persinn Sea ; it re-appears fully in Australia , where the Gulf of Nuyts occupies almost the wholo southern side .
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Critics are not the legislators , but the iudges and police of literature . They do not make laws—tney interpret and try to enforce th . eva . —Edivbtvrg h Review .
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¦ ¦ March 37 , 1852 . ] . ^ ; THE | iAMR . \ 301
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" At a later period , Humboldt also called our attention to tho singular parallelism existing between tho two sides of tho Atlantic . Tho salient angles of tho one correspond to tho gulfs and bays of tho other ; Cape St . Roquo in America , answers to tho Gulf of Guinea ; tho headland of Africa , of which Capo Verd is tho extreme point , to tho Gulf of Mexico ; so that this ocean takes tho form of a groat valley , like thoHO of which mountainous countries furnish us with many examples . " Steffens pushed his observations farther . Ho noticed that tho lands approach each other , and expand , towards tho North , while they separate and narrow down to points in tho South . This is true not only of tho continental massoa , but of all tho important peninsulas connected with in AmericaScandinavia
thorn . Greenland , California , Florida , ; , Spain , Italy , and Greece , in Europe ; and tho Indies , Corea , and KamBtchatka , inAsia ; all have their points turned towards tho south . StefFons also observed , that tho continents are grouped two by two , in throo double worlds , of each of which tho two component parts arc united together by an isthmus or chain of islands ; and moreover , on one sido of tho isthmus is found an archipelago , on tho other side a peninsula . Theso aro great facts in geography : they invest tho Map with a now and peculiar interest , for no sooner does man bogin to trace resemblances and group facts , than his speculative instinct becomes active in the search after causes . To Germany wo owe all tho important discoveries in geographical science . Forster , Pallas , Steffens , and Humboldt , are tho only
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Leader (1850-1860), March 27, 1852, page 301, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse2.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1928/page/17/
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