it is impossible not to sympathize. Their Every attempt to deprive the ballot of its zeal may not be according to knowledge, and safeguard of secrecy should be rigorously their method appears, at times, almost touch-resisted. The classes which are swayed into ing from the ingenuous simplicity which voting contrary to their convictions, because -confides in it; but they are at least in the Church or society looks askance at disearnest; and the real end they have in view sentients, do not deserve much sympathy on is certainly the ostensible one. Unhappily their own account; but it is sometimes these good people are powerless to legalize necessary to protect society, if not themtheir repressive system without the aid of a selves, against the pliability of the feeblelarge and hungry crowd of party men, whom kneed, and certainly some such protection is no powerful enthusiasm moves, and no phil- imperatively called for here. It is difficult anthropic aspiration elevates by its purity to say whether Section eighty-four, which and warmth of emotion. Hence such agita- threatens every one who "in any manner tions as have been witnessed of late years practises intimidation, or interferes with the entail the sinister growth of a terrible crop of free exercise of the franchise of any voter," is, arrant hypocrisy, and to it they owe at once like the Election law, applicable to untheir temporary success and their definitive due clerical influence; if so, those who have and disastrous failure in the long run. The been in the habit of dubbing men who reflection that this is, and must be, the case "vote wrong" children of the devil and mecertainly casts no reflection upon the earnest nacing them with eternal damnation, may and sincere; but it should make them pause see the propriety of amending their manners. and examine dispassionately and afresh the Section eighty-one appears to prohibit the ground on which they stand. There are employment of paid agents, lecturers, or doubtless religious hypocrites as well as pro- pamphlet, essay, or newspaper writers pending hibition hypocrites, but then religion is in- a vote on the law. This does not seem dedisputably a good, while prohibitory legisla- fensible, and yet the words, "who endeavours tion is not only of so exceedingly ques- to procure or prevent the adoption of this tionable a character, whether we regard Act," certainly covers all who use the art of it in theory or practice, that the simul- persuasion, either with tongue or pen. Atation and dissimulation it evokes, must tention was called last month to the absurd be thrown in the balance against it. It position under which, supposing both the is part of the price paid for it, and County of York and the City of Toronto therefore must be taken into account as were under the Act, those who desire to proa factor in the calculation. Moreover, reli- cure a supply of beer or wine in the one, gion would contain within it quite as much must resort to some dealer in the other. If potency and promise of ultimate triumph, if Mr. Cartwright desires to save his revenue there were but one faithful soul, such as Eli- by this clause, it ought to be altered so as to jah in the wilderness at Horeb imagined him- stand as in the Dunkin Act; if he must self to be, in a godless and depraved gene- have "the wages of sin," as it is called, he ration. But it is not so with coercive legis- might, at all events, devise a more rational lation. scheme than this. Sections fifty-six and fiftyseven ought certainly to be amended in some way which will ensure that a petition must receive something more than a bare majority of the votes polled. These may be cast, and have been under the Dunkin Act, by not even a majority of the recorded votes altogether, yea and nay. Now, obviously, the Act has no chance of being effective where it is put in force by the votes of perhaps not more than a quarter or two-fifths of the qualified voters. Under such circumstances it must fail; and it ought to fail, because, bad in principle as it may be to allow a majority to tyrannize over a minority in a matter of food, drink, or dress, it becomes utterly If it be unjust, majorities cannot make it otherwise; yet even though it be defensible in theory, its wisdom as well as its efficiency, depends upon the number of those who honestly support it. When these numbers are swelled by a herd of craven camp-followers who have no heart or honest enthusiasm for the movement, it is condemned already before the futile experiment is tried. There not being much prospect that hon. members will deal with straightforward plainness with the principle of this Bill, even although they may honestly believe it to be indefensible, it may not be too much to hope that they will make some attempt to save it from the perilous infatuation of its authors. intolerable when the majority is dragooned, The present Session of Parliament will have come to a close before our next number appears. It has not been an eventful one in measures of striking character or great practical importance. Considerable tinkering of old laws has been done, and the noise of hammering has rattled freely enough; but the forge was not Vulcan's, and no heroic shields have been turned out of the armoury. We live, politically speaking, in what is distinctively "the day of small things;" its utter paltriness and pettiness are, so to speak, the salient characteristics of the time. On the eve of a general election, when politicians usually desire to appear at their best, and when they are morbidly solicitous about the future, there is at least some affectation of high tone, of noble aspiration-something or anything to shed dignity and credit over the legislators' trade. It is vain to look for it now. Neither one side nor the other-and they are not wanting in ingenuity and "smartness "---could tell, were its champions interrogated, what it is they are about to contend for. Or rather, they could tell, but: dare not. The only two debates which had any real interest for the country, those on Sir John Macdonald's Protection and Quebec resolutions, were snuffed out by the Premier in mid-career. It is of more importance, apparently, to unravel the plot of the Moylan business, or to burrow for scandal on the Kaministiquia, than to devise a national. policy for the country, or to calmly consider the relations between the Crown and its advisers. The essential pettiness of the time. could hardly receive more graphic illustration than the attempts to belittle the character and give a second coat of mire to the back of Sir John Macdonald. Partizans hoped that "the great scandal" had smothered the veteran politician and buried him. in slime and ooze beyond recovery. They were mistaken, and the cause of their mistake was that they imagined the people to be as implacable and resentful as themselves. Sir John's fiasco in 1872, if not condoned, has fallen out of the account; it is written off, and there is an end of it. party men may do, the ordinary honest farmer, merchant, or mechanic cannot affect a tempest of anger when he feels none; and the attempt, by nibbling investigations about this $150 or that two or three thousand, are about as serviceable to the party that indulges in them as it would have been in the elder brother of the prodigal son to have pointed out some petty rent in his travel-stained garment. Not being attached to either party, and singularly indifferent to the fate of both, except in so far as the only principle at stake is involved in the issue, we can afford to look without bias upon the conduct and merits of both. It needs hardly be said that Sir John Macdonald is not our notion of what a statesman ought to be, but he has sterling ability, personal integrity, great experience, and, above all, a wonderful power of winning the hearts and affections of men. The attempts made to hatch new scandals about Sir John are exceedingly unwise and quite as nauseating as scandal about Queen Elizabeth was to the sage of The Critic. If the Government desires to elevate the ex-Premier in popular estimation, nothing yet remains to be done but to discover or invent something new savouring of corruption; he will then at once attain the unapproachable dignity of a persecuted hero, and the down fall of the Government cannot be far distant. No more serious strategical blunder was ever committed than the Moylan investigation, undertaken at this time of day, solely for hustings' purposes; and we are inclined to think that when hon. gentlemen begin the campaign, they will find their weakness where they confidently expected to feel their strength, in their assaults upon the leader of the Opposition. It is a sign of awakening conscience, over the lines, that the House Judiciary Committee has come to the conclusion at last that the balance of the money awarded at Geneva, to compensate certain classes of losses by privateering, ought not to be given to classes definitely excluded by the tribunal. Most men, not altogether depraved, that is in private life, would not have had so much difficulty in deciding that, when Uncle Sam became a trustee for certain people and received from John Bull too large a sum to satisfy their just claims, the balance did not belong to the trustee, nor did it rest with him to distribute it according to his fancy. When all the debts adjudged to be due by the International Court were satisfied, the balance was John Bull's, and unless the conscientious trustee were, under a little veneering, a rogue, it became him to pay it back again. Gen. Butler, who always puts in a good word for "the devil and all his works," proposed to pay the fishery award with the Geneva balance, although he contended that the Halifax arbitrament was not binding. The proposal to pay a debt the United States did not owe with money which did not belong to them was a master stroke of Butlerism; but the point of the practical witticism lay in paying England with her own money, fraudulently pocketed. It is gratifying to find that the House Committee dares to tell the truth, and we only regret their proposal to refer the matter to the Supreme Court, because it appears like an attempt to escape from an admitted moral obligation to repay the unemployed balance, by some legal devices they expect the Supreme Court to concoct. April 25th, 1878. BOOK REVIEWS. A MANUAL OF THE ANATOMY OF INVERTEBRATED ANIMALS. By Thomas H. Huxley. New York: D. Appleton & Co.; Toronto: Hart & Rawlinson. 1878. Not a few people, even in this so-called cultivated age, believe that the chief function of a scientific man is to propound or attack some startling theory. When the gage of battle has been thrown down in the shape, we will say, of the principle of natural selection, it appears to common minds as though the world of Science contained no other object or aim, and as if Darwin, Wallace, Huxley, and other well-known men rushed into arms with the sole purpose of defending their challenged thesis, and investigated and questioned Nature merely for the purpose of supporting their dogma, and with as little regard for the actual truth as is shown by a browbeating counsel determined, at any cost, to elicit something damaging to his adversary's case from an unwilling witness. That this is not really the case, and that the reputations of the great men whom we have named were not won by such ignoble tactics and partisan warfare, is well known to all who have followed them, however far off, in their labours and their struggles; and this book would alone suffice to show what a comparatively small portion of the scientific field is occupied by even such an all-embracing doctrine as that enunciated by Mr. Darwin. If that doctrine had never been propounded, naturalists would still have found "ample scope and verge enough' for their exertions in the investigation of the external shape and the internal structure of the living creation, in the determination of the distribution, in space and in time, of its individuals and of the classes to which they belong, and in the discovery of the laws regulating those forces which are exerted by living matter alone upon itself and upon external objects. In other words, the three great heads of Morphology, Distribution, and Physiology attract the student before he can turn his attention profitably to the fourth head, Etiology, which purports to explain to what causes the results hitherto obtained are attributable, and how any particular animal existence has attained its present form and position, and the enjoyment of its own peculiar powers. With the world before him and his microscope in his hand, the first duty of the naturalist is to examine carefully and to record his results faithfully. From those results he is at liberty to theorize, but woe to his reputation if he permits his favourite theory to close his eye to a single fact, or, having seen it, to place upon it a forced construction. We will venture to say that this is so well understood now-a- | days, and naturalists feel so keenly the ultimate detection that would ensue, with all its attendant shade of distrust thrown over the work of a lifetime, that when a Huxley writes a manual like the one now under review, it is accepted by men of all opinions as at least containing a faithful and unbiassed representation of facts. Whether all animated nature sprang from a single germ or not, every one will agree that there is no lack of variety in creation as we now behold it, and that an intimate knowledge of its present condition is the only solid foundation upon which to build a theory as to its past or its future. What fact is most borne in upon us by reading this work? Without the least hesitation we should say, the adaptability of matter, which, by almost innumerably varying means, seeks to attain, and does attain, results wonderful in their intimate connection, and no less wonderful in their apparent diversity. All animal life has primarily but three strictly necessary functions-those of nourishment (including under this head the functions performed by the organs, such as the mouth, which collect the food, by the stomach which digests it, and by the veins or canals which carry the elaborated nourishment to the places where it is needed to replace the waste incurred in the act of existence), excretion (which covers the functions of the respiratory, intestinal, and uropoietic systems, all of which are designed to clear the body from the carbonic and nitrogenous waste of the blood, and from substances incapable of assimilation), and reproduction. These are the strictly necessary functions, for our present condition of knowledge is not such as to allow us to lay it down as a broad rule that a nervous system is a sine qua non of life, and certainly such organs as eyes, ears, and the various shapes of legs, tentacles, feelers, and wings adaptable for locomotive purposes, are entirely supererogatory, and could be easily dispensed with. However, we find that in the lowest form of | life existing (the simplest of the Protozoa) a vast stride has been made on the upward path towards the acquirement of even these organs. For the simplest form of life imaginable would be, as Mr. Huxley tells us, "a protoplasmic body, devoid of mobility, maintaining itself by the ingestion of such proteinaceous, fatty, amyloid, and mineral matters as might be brought into contact with it by external agencies, and increasing by simple extension of its mass." In such an imaginary and, so far as we know, nonexistent animal, both nourishment and excretion would go on over the entire surface, and reproduction would be almost concealed from our notice, the individual apparently remaining always the same, but being, in fact, perpetually replaced by the substitution of new matter for that expended by the act of living. In the humblest Protozoa we find a mass of simple protoplasm, not differentiated into cells, it is true, but yet gifted with the power of contractility, and denser as you approach the exterior of the mass than it is at the centre, and visibly propagating itself by fission or division. The greater density of the periphery is the first step towards a cuticle or skin, and the next higher grade of Protozoa shows a rythmically contractile vacuole; others again show a nucleus or rounded mass in the midst of the protoplasm. Instead of the primitive, nearly homogeneous mass, we have now a comparatively complicated animal, for the increase of density at the periphery and the segregation of atoms forming the nucleus have left a central sac available for the purposes of a stomach. The mouth and anal aperture are nothing but the two ends of this elongated sac,* where it approaches the periphery, for by this time our Protozoa has ceased to take in its food, save at a definite point of its surface. The contractile vacuole more and more tends, as we proceed on the upward scale, to draw out into a chain of canals for the conveyance of blood or other kindred fluids through the system, and the nucleus takes upon itself, with more or less definiteness, the character of a reproductive organ. The Metazoa start from almost as primitive a type, the chief distinction being that the wall of the sac is double and composed of cells. The innermost of these two walls is the endoderm, the outer the ectoderm, and between them a third layer, the mesoderm, is formed. Upon this simple arrangement innumerable changes are rung, before we pass from the Turbellaria to the Insecta, the chief being the division of the mesoderm into segments (somites), * The Ciliata show the connecting link between animals with and without an intestinal canal and anal aperture. The food is driven by hairs (cilia) to the bottom of the stomach, and then passes at intervals, in the shape of a food-vacuole, through the substance of the body, to the anal region, following a more or less definitely limited tract. city and adaptibility to circumstances sufficient to meet the requirements of the most ardent Darwinian. Mr. Huxley is not disposed to consider classification as a very important element in natural history. He acknowledges its utility in point the outgrowth from each segment of its pair of appendages, and the differentiation of these appendages into such special organs as jaws, limbs, and respiratory organs, and branchia or fins. Out of these three layers or skins, all the important organs, alike in the Hydrozoon and in embryonic man, are formed; the parting out common bonds of likeness, but draws of the mesoderm nearest to the ectoderm furnishing the bones, muscles, and the teeth of Vertebrata; the ectoderm itself supplying the skin, nails, and enamel of the teeth, the sensory organs, and the ganglia of the nervous system; while the endoderm becomes the alimen- | tary organs. Let us take the respiratory apparatus, and glance briefly at the different modes in which the same result is attained in various animals. First, the lower Metazoa breathe all over their their bodies; the Annelids develop branchiæ freely supplied with blood vessels or their equivalents, and fringed with cilia or hairs, the motion of which causes a current of fresh oxygenated water to flow past. The Crustacea attain the same object without cilia, the branchia being attached to the limbs, which move them to and fro at pleasure. We have now arrived at a special organ which undertakes the respiratory function itself, and an accessory organ (such as the limb in the above case, or the "mantle" of the mollusks) which regulates and assists the flow of the water to the primary breathing organ. The Tunicata have a different apparatus. Having taken in water at the mouth, it is driven out again from the cavity of the pharynx through lateral apertures, aerating the blood in its passage outwards. Some land-mollusks breathe by means of the folded lining wall of the mantle cavity, and this is appropriately termed an external lung. On the other hand, the Vertebrata have lungs composed of a portion of the alimentary canal, which has become specialized for that purpose; and in some of them the blood is forced into the lungs from without, whilst in the higher members of the Vertebrata the lung-chamber, by its expansion, sucks the blood into the lungs, the motive power being employed to form a vacuum within. Space does not allow our going more fully into this subject, or showing from the history of the other organs how marvellously mobile and shifting are the materials of which Creation is made up, and in how many different ways the same end is attained. When we find that a Barnacle may be described (p. 256) as a Crustacean fixed by its head and kicking the food into its mouth with its legs," we must at least admit that animated matter displays a plasti *For instances of variations in position, see the opossum shrimp (Mysis), whose auditory organs are placed in the appendages of the last ring of the stomach; or the Insecta generally, where they are placed in the thorax and legs. attention to the fact that as new discoveries are made, the boundary walls between genera, classes, and families are apt to be more or less broken down, and it becomes every year more difficult to say to which family this or that new form belongs, when it combines to a great extent the peculiarities of several. The microscope also tends to show points of similarity hitherto unexpected, and while it unravels and makes as plain as day the mysteries of yesterday, it prepares in turn the Edipus-like riddles of to-morrow. Thus Engelmann and others have disposed of a very pecular form of generation noticed in the Infusoria, in a summary manner, by showing that the "so-called embryos are only parasites ! But while this is satisfactory as far as it goes, we cannot dismiss these parasites without naming and describing them in turn, and the next generation of scientists will probably be investigating their parasites, "ad infinitum," as the immortal Hudibras puts it. We cannot altogether praise the typography of this edition. Like most American reprints, it is full of misspellings, which are particularly annoying in a technical work. The plates are poorly reproduced, and their lettering is so small and indistinct as to be at times illegible. In looking up the references to the internal economy of some extremely complicated Zoophyte or Brachiopoda, it is extremely annoying to be told "letters same as in Fig. 40," which said figure is perhaps a dozen pages off. The author might, perhaps, have devoted more space than he does to the Arthropoda, considering the fact that it contains four times as many species as the rest of the animal kingdom put together. The Insecta in particular are treated very meagerly. We must also complain of the great need of a glossary to a work which teems with technical expressions, many of which are of recent coinage, and all of which need explanation to a student. In other respects the book is everything that could be desired. BOOKS RECEIVED. BY CELIA'S ARBOUR. A Novel. By Walter Besant and James Rice, authors of "The Golden Butterfly," &c. Toronto: Rose-Belford Publishing Co. 1878. MADAME GOSSELIN. From the French of Louis |