rst edition, we should cordially recommend these volumes to those who wish to take a general survey of this department of human learning. The various subjects are, for the most part, treated in a manner intelligible and agreeable to the unlearned reader. As an authority, Whewell is generally trustworthy, and as a critic usually fair. But in a work going over so much ground it would be unreasonable to expect perfect accuracy, and uniformly just estimates of the labors of all scientific men. Dr. Whewell's scientific philosophy naturally affects his ability as an historian and critic. In his Bridgewater Treatise, he indulged in a fling at mathematics, for which we have never wholly forgiven him; and in the present volume we see repeated evidence of his underestimate of the value of the sciences of Space and Time. He says, Vol. I. p. 600, that it was an "erroneous assumption" in Plato to hold mathematical truths as "Realities more real than the Phenomena." But to us it seems impossible to understand any work of Nature aright, except by taking this view of Plato. The study of natural science is deserving of the contempt which Samuel Johnson bestowed upon it, if it be not a study of the thoughts of the Divine Mind. And as phenomena are subject to laws of space and time as their essential condition, they are primarily a revelation of the mathematical thoughts of the Creator. Those mathematical ideas are, in Erigena's phrase, the created creators of all that can appear.
This false view of the mathematics lies at the foundation of Whewell's view of a type in organized nature. He conceives a genus to consist of those species which resemble the typical species of the genus more than they resemble the typical species of any other genus. It follows from this view that a species might be created that would not belong to any genus, but resemble equally the types of two or three genera. Thus, our little rue-leaved anemone might belong to the meadow rues or to the wind-flowers, at the pleasure of the botanist. We believe that classification is vastly more real than this, real as geometry itself. Another instance of a similar want of idealism in Dr. Whewell may be found in Vol. II. p. 643:--"Nothing is added to the evidence of design by the perception of a unity of plan which in no way tends to promote the design." Now to one who believes, with us, that a thought is as real as the execution of the thought, the perception of a unity of plan is the highest evidence of design. No more convincing evidence of the existence of an Intelligent Designer is to be found than in the unity of plan,--and his design, thus proved, is the completion of the plan. For what purpose he would complete it, is a secondary question.
In this third edition many valuable additions have been made; and no tales of Oriental fancy could be more wonderful than some of these records of the discoveries in exact science made by our contemporaries. What more magical than the miracles performed every day in our telegraphic offices?--unless it be the transmission of human speech in that manner under the waves of the Mediterranean from Africa to Europe. What more like the dreams of alchemy than taking metallic casts, in cold metal, with infinitely more delicacy and accuracy than by melted metals,--taking them, too, from the most fragile and perishable moulds? What sounds more purely fanciful than to assert a connection between variations in the direction of the compass-needle and spots on the surface of the sun! or what is more improbable than that the period of solar spots should be ten years? What would seem to be more completely beyond the reach of human measurement than the relative velocities of light in air and in water, since the velocity in each is probably not less than a hundred thousand miles a second? Yet two different experimenters arrived, according to Whewell, in the same year, 1850, at the same result,-- that the motion is slower in water; thus supplying the last link of experimental proof to establish the undulatory theory of light. While the records of science are strewn on every page with accounts of such triumphs of human skill and intellect, we see no need of resorting to fiction or to necromancy for the gratification of a natural taste for the marvellous.
It is true, Dr. Whewell does not give these discoveries, in the spirit of an alchemist, as marvels,--but in the spirit of a philosopher, as intellectual triumphs. Few men of our times have shown a more active and powerful mind, a more earnest
