might have fed, the darkly-bewildered on whose way she might
have shed some little guiding light. Now all was revealed :-
'The sorrow I might have soothed,
And the unregarded tears;

For many a thronging shape was there,
From long-forgotten years.

Each pleading look, that long ago

I scanned with a heedless eye,
Each face was gazing as plainly there,
As when I passed it by :

Woe! woe for me if the past should be
Thus present when I die!

Alas! I have walked thro' life

Too heedless where I trod;

Nay, helping to trample my fellow worm,
And fill the burial sod.

Oh! the wounds I might have healed!

The human sorrow and smart!

And yet it never was in

To play so ill a part:

my soul

But evil is wrought by want of Thought,

As well as want of Heart."

When a man like this has lived his life and done his work, and Death has put his Finis' to the book, one great question is, 'What has he laid up for himself out of this life to bear interest in another?' The question on our side is, 'What has he done for the world; what is the value of his life and writings to us?' Hood's life was a long disease, for which death alone possessed the secret of healing; a hand to hand, foot to foot, and face to face struggle day by day with adverse circumstances for the means of living. Yet out of all the suffering he secreted a precious pearl of poetry which will be a thing of beauty;' and, in spite of the poverty and pain, he shed on the world such a smile of fun and fancy as will be a merry memory for ever.'

But it is Thomas Hood's chief glory that he remembered the forgotten.' His greatest work is that which his poems will do for the Poor. The proudest place for his name is on the banner borne at the head of their great army as it marches on to many a victory over ignorance, crime, and wrong. The lines written by Eschylus for his own epitaph show us that he was prouder of having fought at Marathon and left his mark upon the Mede than of all the works he had written. Heine the German PoetWit tells his countrymen he does not know whether he has won the laurel, nor does he care what they say of him as a poet;

but

but they may lay a sword upon his coffin because he was a brave soldier in the war for the freedom of mankind. In like manner,

when we may have expatiated on the wit of Hood, or shown his fancy at the daintiest, the highest praise we can award is symbolled on his own tomb-stone, 'He sang the Song of the Shirt:' he gave one fitting voice to the dark, dumb world of poverty. Whilst others might be discussing the 'Condition-of-England' question, and some were for reforming humanity by new societary systems, and many sat with folded arms, saying, 'There is nothing new and there is nothing true, and it does not matter; come, let us worship Nirwana!' the poet went straight to the heart of the matter, which was the common human heart that underlies all difference of condition, all heavings of the body politic, all shapes of government. We do not say that he was faultless, or that he always succeeded in holding the balance even between the different classes of men. Indeed, his very last aspiration was to correct an error which some of his writings might seem to encourage. He says in the letter to Sir Robert Peel above alluded to, the last letter that he ever wrote,- My physical debility finds no tonic virtue in a steel pen, otherwise I would have written one more papera forewarning one-against an evil, or the danger of it, arising from a literary movement in which I have had some share, a one-sided humanity, opposite to that catholic Shaksperian sympathy, which felt with king as well as peasant, and duly estimated the mortal temptations of both stations. Certain classes at the poles of society are already too far asunder; it should be the duty of all writers to draw them nearer by kindly attraction, not to aggravate the existing repulsion, and place a wider moral gulf between rich and poor, with hate on the one side and fear on the other. But I am too weak for this task, the last I had set myself; it is death that stops my pen, you see, and not the pension.'

Finally, Hood was not one of those lofty and commanding minds that rise but once an age, on the mountain ranges of which light first smiles and last lingers. He does not keep his admirers standing at gaze in distant reverence and awe! He is no cold, polished, statuesque idol of the intellect, but one of the darlings of the English heart. You never think of Hood as dead and turned to marble. Statue or bust could never represent him to the imagination. It is always a real human being, a live workfellow or playfellow that meets you with the quaintest, kindliest smile, takes you by the hand, looks into your face, and straightway your heart is touched to open and let him in. In life he complained of his cold hand; it used to be chilly as though he was so near an acquaintance of Death that they shook hands.

daily. You cannot feel the cold hand now; that was put off with the frail mortality. The hand he lays in yours is warm with life. He draws you home to him. You must see Hood in his home to know him: see how he touches with something of beauty the homeliest domestic relationships; see how he will transmute the leadenest cares into the gold of wit or poetry; keep a continual ripple of mirth and sparkle of sunny light playing over the smiling surface that hides the quiet dark deeps where the tragic life is lived unseen; from the saddest, dreariest night overhead bring out fairy worlds of exquisite fancy touched with rosiest light. And whatsoever place his name may win in the Temple of Fame, it is destined to be a household word with all who speak the English language. Though not one of the highest and most majestic amongst Immortals, he will always be among those who are near and dear to the English heart for the sake of his noble pleading of the cause of the Poor, and few names will call forth so tender a familiarity of affection as that of rare Tom Hood.'

ART. III.—The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation. By Sir Charles Lyell, F.R.S. 2nd Ed., pp. 528. 1863.

EOLOGY no longer deserves the reproach uttered by the

GE

first and greatest of paleontologists, that its votaries neglected the study of the later periods of the history of the earth, and sought no help from a knowledge of its actual state toward explaining its former conditions. During the halfcentury which has elapsed since Cuvier declared himself to be an antiquary of a new order,' his successors have arrived at the clear conception of the real unity of the whole system of terrestrial events, depending on the general forces of heat and motion, which may be regarded as almost constant in their effects, and the special operations on the land, in the sea, and in the air, which are not the same for successive instants of time, or separated points on the surface of the planet. In the mind of the geologists of the present day, the monuments of the past and the phenomena now passing before us concur to form one united basis of a just history of natural processes on the earth.

The principle, so long contested, so hard to master, the principle that the causes now manifested in action are the same which have been employed from the beginning, has at length acquired

universal

universal acceptance. Geology is fairly registered and takes high rank among the inductive sciences; contributing to all facts of great importance in their history, and gathering from all substantial aid toward the sound interpretation of its many discoveries. To astronomy it furnishes sensible proofs of the vast antiquity and successive conditions of this globe; and receives in return the precious results of the planetary theory which include these conditions. From mechanical science it borrows speculative investigations as to the condition of the interior of the earth, and the fracture of its crust; and repays the obligation by positive truths regarding the elevation of mountains, and the excavation of valleys, the varying depths of the sea, the direction of ancient currents, and the courses of ancient rivers. Zoology and botany no longer stand aloof and gaze in despair at the wondrous forms of plants and animals of earlier ages of the world; but after strict research admit the Saurian monsters of the oolite, and the gigantic plants of the coal, to vacant places in the great series of life which nothing now living could fill. Every branch of science has been disturbed by the progress of geological discovery, and perplexed by the new questions to which it has given rise..

The answers to these questions have brought to view a new difficulty which affects the whole course of geological interpretation, and every determination in which time is one of the elements. It is agreed on all hands that the phenomena of ancient nature can only be interpreted by the aid of the physical laws which now prevail on the land, in the waters, and in the air. The effects wrought in ancient nature are rightly referred to the forces which produce similar results before our eyes. The measure of these effects in a given interval of time varies from place to place, and from time to time, in conformity with the conditions under which the cause operates. If this measure be hard to fix in this present period, how is it to be ascertained for ancient periods?

Sir C. Lyell has many followers who hold, perhaps more strictly than he requires, the opinion that the physical condition of the globe is, on the whole, unaffected by time, and that the changes in early geological periods must be measured by the same rate as those now in progress. Others maintain that our actual system of slow and almost insensible physical change must not be applied to earlier ages when some of the causes acted with higher energy, and produced far greater effects in a given time than now, because they operated under conditions of the earth quite different from what we now perceive.

When geologists of these opposite opinions look at the same Vol. 114.-No. 228.

2 B

great

great phenomena, such as the uplifted Alps, or the fractured mountains in the north of England, they are equally impressed by the magnitude of the effect; but the one sees in it the unequivocal evidence of a great internal power capable of displacing by an uninterrupted short effort large tracts of country and vast masses of rock; the other speaks of small measures of force operating continually, or at short intervals, through an immensity of time.

In the cases now quoted we give the preference to the opinion which assigns to the enormous fractures and violent wrenches in the mountains a force of great magnitude and short period. In other cases, especially where subsidence is indicated, as in the coalfields of Wales, the time appears to have been very long, the movement secular and slow. From a study of these and innumerable other cases, the right conclusion seems to be that the rate of progress of geological events in every age can be discovered only by a study of the particular effects; if these be of a critical and determinate character, the period of time consumed in producing them may be a subject for deliberate estimate; if not, it can only be a matter for conjecture without limit. The reader of 'Evidences of the Antiquity of Man' should keep this in mind.

Two centuries separate us from the days of Agostino Scilla, who vainly claimed for the fishes and shells buried in Italian rocks the recognition of their former residence in the sea. In that short interval of years every region of the earth has been searched for these remains of ancient life; ten thousand species of fossils, mostly of marine origin, are known to occur in the rocks of the British Islands alone; more than twice that number enter the general catalogue. It is no longer denied that they are the remains of creatures once endowed with life, and subject to growth, decay, and death; they are acknowledged for the most part to belong to earlier systems of life, several such systems, indeed,-which began, endured, and passed away before the birth of man. Except in the merely superficial deposits, in peat or gravel, in the sediments of rivers, or the caverns of rocks, the remains of men have never been found. Nor in general have the remains of the quadrupeds most useful to man been recognised, except in similar situations. So that on a first view of the subject, there appears in the very latest step of the geological scale of time only a mere trace for the period of man and his contemporaries, while earlier races of living things, which filled the waters and covered the land, vindicate for themselves an immensity of unchronicled ages. In the contemplation of these unmeasured periods, and

the