Mill's essay on Liberty, was stung with indignation. He made an attack on the judge with such passion that even his friends condemned him for violence. The incident shows that Buckle's theories about liberty and tolerance were no mere literary ornaments, but were genuine convictions rooted in a deeply sensitive nature.

When the History of Civilisation appeared it became plain that the author had got hold of a new conception of history. He wanted history to rise above the almanac ideal; he wanted to discover causes. History, in the opinion of Buckle, should enable man not only to know but to understand the past. Buckle takes it for granted that social progress-in other words civilisation-conforms to laws, and he sets himself to discover what these are. His conception of law is antagonistic to the doctrine of the freedom of the will, of which he disposes in a not very satisfactory manner. The subtleties of metaphysical thinking were not quite in Buckle's line. Civilisation, he finds, is influenced by four great physical agencies: climate, food, soil, and the general aspect of nature. Outside of Europe nature is too strong for man; consequently civilisation proper can best be studied in European countries where man has triumphed over nature. The study of man thus becomes necessary as a preliminary to the study of civilisa

tion.

In Buckle's opinion progress owes nothing to the moral side of humanity: moral maxims are few and stationary. The progressive element in civilisation is due to the intellect, by which man discovers new truths, thereby increasing man's rule over nature. Having cleared the ground, Buckle proceeds to show that the one thing needful in order that intellectualism shall have full play is liberty. Some of the most eloquent passages in his book are in defence of liberty and in denunciation of the protective spirit, whether it takes the form of theological or political authority. Apart from its theories, the History of Civilisation was at once accepted as a work of the first rank. It was recognised as a striking attempt to bring scientific method into a region of activity which had hitherto been given over to anarchy. In England various efforts, mostly fragmentary, had been made in the direction of sociology, but till Buckle wrote nothing had been done on a comprehensive scale. Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations showed the way, and on the same line proceeded Hume and Ferguson in Scotland. Mixed with political theorising a thread of sociological speculation may be detected in Burke. Coming nearer our own time, the Economists were keenly alive to the need of a science of society, as may be seen from J. S. Mill's essay on Civilisation. It was reserved for Buckle to tackle the subject in scientific fashion. If his work is defective, if it fails to embody the fruitful idea of evolution in the interpretation of social phenomena, still to Buckle remains the credit of opening up by a new method an almost unexplored field for scientific treatment.

From the standpoint of present knowledge it is easy to find flaws in the History of Civilisation, but the true critic will rather dwell upon the greatness of Buckle's conceptions than upon faults which are due to well-understood limitations.

The Ideal Historian.

In the moral world, as in the physical world, nothing is anomalous, nothing is unnatural, nothing is strange. All is order, symmetry, and law. There are opposites, but there are no contradictions. In the character of a nation inconsistency is impossible. Such, however, is still the backward condition of the human mind, and with so evil and jaundiced an eye do we approach the greatest problems that not only common writers, but also men from whom better things might be hoped, are on this point involved in constant confusion, perplexing themselves and their readers by speaking of inconsistency, as if it were a quality belonging to the subject they investigate, instead of being, as it really is, a measure of their own ignorance. It is the business of the historian to remove this ignorance by showing that the movements of nations are perfectly regular, and that, like all other movements, they are solely determined by their antecedents. If he cannot do this he is no historian. He may be an annalist or a biographer or a chronicler, but higher than that he cannot rise, unless he is imbued with that spirit of science which teaches as an article of faith the doctrine of uniform sequence; in other words, the doctrine that certain events having already happened, certain other events corresponding to them will also happen. To seize this idea with firmness and to apply it on all occasions without listening to any exceptions is extremely difficult, but it must be done by whoever wishes to elevate the study of history from its present crude and informal state, and do what he may towards placing it in its proper rank, as the head and chief of all the sciences. Even then he cannot perform his task unless his materials are ample, and derived from sources of unquestioned credibility. But if his facts are sufficiently numerous; if they are very diversified; if they have been collected from such various quarters that they can check and confront each other, so as to do away with all suspicion of their testimony being garbled; and if he who uses them possesses that faculty of generalisation without which nothing great can be achieved, he will hardly fail in bringing some part of his labours to a prosperous issue, provided he devotes all his strength to that one enterprise, postponing to it every other object of ambition, and sacrificing to it many interests which men hold dear. Some of the most pleasurable incentives to action he must disregard. Not for him are those rewards which, in other pursuits, the same energy would have earned; not for him the sweets of popular applause; not for him the luxury of power; not for him a share in the councils of his country; not for him a conspicuous and honourable place before the public eye. . . . To solve the great problem of affairs, to detect those hidden circumstances which determine the march and destiny of nations, and to find in the events of the past a key to the proceedings of the future, is nothing less than to unite into a single science all the laws of the moral and physical world. Whoever does this will build up afresh the fabric of our knowledge, rearrange its various parts, and harmonise its apparent discrepancies.

(From The History of Civilisation.)

James Hinton (1822-75), son of the Rev. Howard Hinton, a Baptist minister, was born at Reading, the third of eleven children. When he was sixteen years old the family needs caused him to be withdrawn from school, but he had an eager mind, and more than supplied for himself the deficiencies of his school training. After serving as a commercial clerk in London for several years, he entered upon a medical career, and in 1847 he passed his examination as a surgeon with distinction. A voyage to China and a period of residence in Jamaica enlarged his experience. Returning to England, he commenced to practise in London, and ultimately gained a high position as a specialist in aural surgery. In 1852 he was married to Miss Margaret Haddon, a union which proved to be entirely admirable.

Although Hinton gave to his profession all the time and thought that were needed, questions of ethics and social welfare commanded his keenest interest. When occupied in the city, and afterwards during his residence in Jamaica, he had seen much of human suffering, and these incidents left a lasting impression on his sensitive and sympathetic mind. As years went on he devoted himself more and more to a consideration of the squalid life of slums and alleys, and to the discovery—if such were possible-of some means of amelioration. The condition of outcast women affected him especially. How to remove this great wrong became his absorbing study, and he conceived a scheme, revolutionary and far-reaching, which he believed, if put in operation, would prove effectual. The Law Breaker and Philosophy and Religion, published after his death, contained passages from his voluminous writings on this subject, but the main part of his work has not yet appeared. In his last days he became aware that he had attempted an impossible task-had 'tried for too much and failed.' He even feared that the plans he had recommended might add to the evil he so earnestly strove to remove instead of mitigating it, and with this in his mind he actually destroyed a large quantity of his manuscript. Borne down with a conviction of failure, he died at the Azores at the age of fifty-three. Yet even to the last he did not wholly abandon the faith that had upheld him all along, that all things joy and sorrow alike-work for good. Opposed both by temperament and conviction to asceticism, he nevertheless preached self-sacrifice, affirming that 'the true affinities of sacrifice are with pleasure, with rapture even. It is only by evil or want within that sacrifice can be other than glad.'

All his life Hinton was a tireless thinker and student, a little over-hasty to draw conclusions, yet never dogmatic. Much of his writing takes the form of interrogation, indicating accurately enough the open-minded and eager seeker after truth. As a consequence his books are unusually rich in suggestive thought. Apart from technical writings, his chief works are Man and his Dwell

ing-Place (1859); Life in Nature (1862); The Mystery of Pain (1866); The Place of the Physician (1874); Essays on the Law of Human Life (1874); Chapters on the Art of Thinking (1879); Philosophy and Religion (1881); Others' Needs, a pamphlet (1883); The Law Breaker, and The Coming of the Law (1884).

The Life and Letters of James Hinton, by Miss Ellice Hopkins (1878), describes the personal life of Hinton, and contains copious extracts from his thoughtful letters; while light is thrown on his mental and spiritual experiences in Miss Caroline Haddon's Studies in Hinton's Ethics (1886) and in the prefaces to his posthumous

works named above.

WALTER LEWIN.

John Ferguson McLennan (1827–81), born at Inverness and educated at the Universities of Aberdeen and Cambridge, joined the Scottish Bar in 1857, and for three years (1872-75) was draughtsman of parliamentary Bills for Scotland. But his life-work, which made its mark on sociological studies throughout the world, was the series of books and papers in which he propounded and defended, by wide research and masses of evidence gathered from all corners, his theory (partially anticipated by one Swiss author, Bachofen) that historical customs connected with marriage point back to a primitive marriage by capture; that exclusive exogamy was an universal stage in the social development, polyandry preceding monandry; and that matriarchy was prior to the patriarchal system everywhere. To these speculations he was led by his studies in connection with the article 'Law' which he contributed in 1857 to the eighth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. But it was his exposition of the theory in Primitive Marriage (1865) that first challenged the attention of the world. In The Patriarchal Theory (finished by his brother Donald in 1884) he maintained his views against Sir Henry Maine. His entirely original conceptions as to Totemism, also epoch-making, first appeared in the supplement to the first edition of Chambers's Encyclopædia in 1868; and he wrote on kinship, polyandry, the family, the worship of animals, and other sociological problems. By his various writings he gave a great impulse to sociological studies; all subsequent research took account of his views, though some of them have been superseded as knowledge of savage usages has become wider and more precise. Primitive Marriage reappeared in 1886 in the volume called Studies in Ancient History, of which studies a second series was published in 1896. A Life of Thomas Drummond, the famous Irish UnderSecretary, was a contribution by McLennan (who was LL.D. of Aberdeen) to a different department of literature.

The Duke of Argyll (GEORGE JOHN DOUGLAS CAMPBELL; 1823-1900) succeeded his father as eighth duke in 1847, and in 1892 was made a duke of the United Kingdom. At nineteen he wrote A Letter to the Peers from a Peer's Son, on the struggle which ended in the disruption of

the Scottish Church. He was in several Liberal Governments as Lord Privy Seal (twice), Postmaster-General, and Secretary of State for India; but he resigned his last public office through his disapproval of Mr Gladstone's Irish Land Bill; and he vigorously opposed Home Rule. His works include, besides papers on zoology, geology, and sociology, and a volume of poems (The Burden of Belief), The Reign of Law (1866), Primeval Man (1869), Antiquities of Iona (1870), The Eastern Question (1879), Scotland as it Was and as it Is (1887), The Unseen Foundations of Society (1893), The Philosophy of Belief (1896), and Organic Evolution Cross-examined (1898). As a statesman and thinker he was fearless and independent, dogmatic and self-confident. He was an eloquent speaker, a keen and irrepressible dialectician constantly at war with Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, or Herbert Spencer, as subverters of what he conceived to be the eternal and immutable foundations of moral, religious, and scientific truth.

Alfred Russel Wallace, naturalist-traveller, evolutionist, and writer on many, especially social, subjects, was born on the 8th of January 1823, at Usk in Monmouthshire, of Scotch ancestry on his father's side. He was educated at Hereford Grammar School, and in his fourteenth year became an apprentice in the office of an elder brother, a land-surveyor and architect. In 1844 he became a master in the Collegiate School at Leicester, where he got to know Henry Walter Bates. Both were keenly interested in natural history, both were eager to explore some virgin land, and it was eventually arranged that they should go off together on a scientific expedition to the Amazons (1848). It is interesting to note that it was Wallace who chose the country to explore, that he had been greatly impressed with Darwin's Journal and Humboldt's Personal Narrative, and that he had definitely in view the possibility of 'solving the problem of the origin of species.' The explorers made their livelihood by sending collections home.

Wallace left South America in 1852, and in the following year he published his interesting Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro. But he had neither solved his problem nor satisfied his exploring bent, and in 1854 he went off again, this time to the Malayan Archipelago, where he spent eight years in studying the fauna from Sumatra to New Guinea. His story was subsequently told in admirable fashion in The Malay Archipelago, the Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise (1869), to which his Island Life (1880) is a not less successful sequel. In his wanderings Wallace made large collections, wrote numerous technical papers, and accumulated great stores of knowledge in regard to the habits, adaptations, and geographical distribution of animals. He became a foremost authority on questions relating to distribution, and his large work, The Geographical Distribution of

Animals (1876), is a monument to his patience and thoroughness. One of his discoveries, the importance of which has been exaggerated, was the establishment of a faunal boundary, usually called 'Wallace's Line.' More notable, however, is the fact that during his explorations, and during an illness at Ternate, he thought out the idea of natural selection (though not using the term), which Darwin was simultaneously developing at home. The pioneer papers of Darwin and Wallace were read together before the Linnæan Society on the 1st of July 1858, and a lifelong friendship, most honourable on both sides, was cemented between the two discoverers.

Wallace has done many services to the evolutionist cause, notably in his Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1871), which some authorities have placed next to the Origin of Species in actual influence, and in his Darwinism (1889), in which he discussed some of the postDarwinian steps of progress in Evolution-Theory. In some respects he may be described as more 'Darwinian' than Darwin, for he has rejected as unproved that phase of sexual selection which depends on female choice, and he has supported the view that acquired characters' are not transmitted. My whole work tends to illustrate the overwhelming importance of Natural Selection over all other agencies in the production of new species.' It was very appropriate that the first Darwin medal of the Royal Society should have been awarded to him (1890).

But the exceptional feature in Wallace's scientific philosophy is his argument that some of the great steps in evolution, such as the origin of the higher characteristics of man, are due to a special evolution hardly distinguishable from creation. He finds their only interpretation in the hypothesis of a spiritual essence or nature, capable of progressive development under favourable conditions.' 'There are at least three stages in the development of the organic world when some new cause or power must necessarily have come into action' the beginning of life, the introduction of consciousness, and the origin of man's higher intellectual and moral faculties. At these several stages of progress a change in essential nature took place, 'due, probably, to causes of a higher order than those of the material universe.' This seems another way of saying that an adequate scientific interpretation of the great steps in question has not been as yet worked out, but there is also implied Wallace's conviction that an interpretation in terms of generally accepted scientific formulæ is impossible.

Always interested, like Spencer and Huxley, in actual human problems, Wallace has written much on social questions, as in his Land Nationalisation (1882); Bad Times (1885); The Wonderful Century, its Successes and Failures (1898); and Studies Scientific and Social (1900). Always fearless, he has written strongly against vaccina

tion and in favour of phrenology, and he has expounded his position as an experimentally convinced spiritualist in Miracles and Modern Spiritualism (1874). His mind is one which reaches a conclusion quickly and holds to it with tenacity; stronger in insight than in logical criticism, but always bold and independent. His style, though not remarkable, is clear and vivid, and always suggestive of enthusiasm and earnestness. In 1881 Wallace received a Civil List pension, in 1882 he was made LL.D. of Dublin, in 1889 D.C.L. of Oxford. He still works quietly in his country home near Dorset, a veteran-the Nestor-among biologists, a naturalist in the old and truest sense, rich in a world-wide experience of animal life, at once a specialist and a generaliser, a humanist thinker and a social striver, a man of science who realises the spiritual aspect of the world.

J. ARTHUR THOMSON.

Thomas Henry Huxley was born at Ealing, then a village near London, on the 4th of May 1825, the seventh and youngest child of an assistant-master in a semi-public school. He inherited from his mother a notable gift of 'rapidity of thought' and many of his physical characteristics as 'a black Celt;' from his father but little except an innate talent for drawing, 'a hot temper, and that amount of tenacity of purpose which unfriendly observers sometimes call obstinacy.' His early education seems to have been scanty and poor of its sort. He had two years of a Pandemonium of a school (between eight and ten), and after that neither help nor sympathy in any intellectual direction till he reached manhood.' Very early, however, he became an omnivorous reader, ranging from Hutton's Geology and Hamilton's Philosophy of the Unconditioned (read at the age of twelve) to Sartor Resartus and modern fiction. His most conspicuous early characteristics were lucidity, a striving after systematisation (witness a boyish scheme for a 'classification of all knowledge'), a habit of 'visualising,' and a bent towards mechanical engineering. Even in after-life this early interest in mechanical problems remained. When between twelve and thirteen he became a medical apprentice, and during this period he stored his mind with literature and science, learned French and German, and laid the foundations of dyspepsia, from which he suffered severely throughout his life. In 1842 he entered as a free scholar at Charing Cross Hospital, where he was particularly influenced by Mr Wharton Jones, who gave him a love for anatomy and a high standard of precise work, and suggested the publication of his first scientific paper. Having completed his medical course, he was induced by a fellow-student, afterwards well known as Sir Joseph Fayrer, to apply for an appointment as surgeon on a ship. He satisfied the Director-General, passed the membership examination of the Royal College of Surgeons,

and was entered on the books of Nelson's old ship, the Victory, for duty at Haslar Hospital. After seven months at Haslar, he was recommended by the chief of the hospital, Sir John Richardson -Arctic explorer and naturalist-as surgeon to H.M.S. Rattlesnake, then about to start for surveying work in the Torres Strait, under command of Captain Owen Stanley.

Thus Huxley, like Darwin, Wallace, Hooker, and many other famous naturalists, secured his Wanderjahre, and he made the most of them. During the voyage of the Rattlesnake he sent communication after communication on the structure of marine animals to the Linnæan Society;

and a paper on the anatomy and affinities of the Medusæ found its way (through the Bishop of Norwich, Captain Stanley's father) to the Royal Society, where it eventually won for the young author the Royal Medal.

Huxley returned to England in the end of 1850, equipped, as Virchow said, 'as a perfect zoologist and keen-sighted ethnologist.' He was granted leave ashore to work out the zoological results of the voyage, and his researches were so obviously important that he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1851, and received the Gold Medal in 1852. In 1853 further leave ashore was refused, and, as Huxley could not see his way to relinquish science, he had to be struck off the Navy List. Steadily, if not rapidly, however, the problem of Brodwissenschaft was solved; in 1854 he succeeded Edward Forbes as Professor of