NATURE YERITAS..

THE idea of this interesting little book appears to have been suggested by The Unseen Universe. Professor Minohin is not one of those who are impressed by the argument that, as all the concentrated energies of Nature are now in course of dissipa- tion, we can hardly avoid the inference that the physical dis- pensation, as we may call it, under which the universe is ordered at present, must have an end, and must therefore, since the energies which produce it are clearly exhaustible, have had some beginning when this exhaustible stock of energy was accumulated in its various fixed reservoirs. Professor Min- shin does not believe in this steady dissipation of energy, though, of coarse, be admits that he sees it going on in the radiation of the heat of the various suns into space. The problem whieh he is anxious to solve is whether or not there may not be some causes at work which tend to the new accumu- lation and concentration of the energy which the radiation of heat tends to diffuse. And his reply to this question is put in the form of an account of an imaginative journey in the stellar spaces to inquire of the supposed inhabitants of different regions whether they know anything of the assumed dissipation of energy by which all the creative provisions of Nature would necessarily come to an end, or not. He meets with an

inteffi- genoe very much on a level with his own, though, as it would appear, slightly superior, in one of the planets circulating round the star Al Ford; and he at once puts the difficulty to him, and is told in reply that it had never occurred to Al Pardians that all energy could possibly remain in the form in which it is useless for the purpose of effecting change. Later in his story of his stellar journey, the author hints his notion of the method in which new accumulations of energy will take place, in the following passage

"I have to say, in conclusion, that in none of the Stellar Systems which I visited could I find any confirmation of my belief in the Prin- ciple of the Dissipation of Energy, either le the opinions of the vari- ous Beings with whom I conversed, or in the facts which they related to me as within the domain of their own knowledge. These facts would of themselves suffice to convince me that the transformation of all forms of Energy into Heat is not final; and that, although Men with their limited field of experience and scanty modee of perception are unable to trace the process, the principle which really holds throughout the Universe is that of the Circulation, or, as the Al Fardian expressed it, the Resurrection, of Energy ; but the authori- tative Revelation of the Aldebaran Spirit places the matter beyond doubt. What has gone before has shown me the danger of making a sweeping generalisation for this vast Universe from the scanty facts which we are able to gather in the Solar System. The conclneion is of too tremendous a magnitude to be at all justified by the existing state of our knowledge, or any that we are ever likely to attain. Fancy Archimedes, or even Kepler, deducing the future state of the Universe from the Science of his time ! What splendid 'laws' might not the latter have deduced from systems of inscribed and circum- scribed cubes, spheres, and other regnlar figures as representing stellar and planetary orbits, if his observations had stopped a little • Peters Yarilm. By George Id. Idinchin, ILA, London Macmillan and O. short ! Even assuming that a system of two bodies, each of the cease and magnitude cif our San, fell together from a practically infinite distance (the distance of Sirius will much more than suffice), and that it contained within itself no other form of Static Energy than that which we recognise Newtonian gravitation in these regions to. possess, the heat developed would (unless I am mistaken in the- celeulation) raise the temperature of the combieed mass by about..

centigrade degrees, where c is the mean specific heat of the sabstanceof the Sun. And even if we take for c so highs value aa lin (a little leas than that of irea), we have the appalling rise of 557,550,000 centigrade degrees."

The authoritative revelation of the Aldebaran spirit here, referred to, is contained in the following verses

So now, that Naturals life will 'fritter down To 'useless Meet' throughout the whole expanse— That Death shall reign through all from base to crewe- ls bat thy last grand- phase of Ignorance.

Nay, set thy blindieg confidence aside, And mark the steps by which thy Science grew— How mush has purpose cif the whole descried ? How much to all unconscious search is due ? One clay the shepherds found the wondrous stone Whose mystic toneh gave thee the guiding bar Which serves the mariner on waters lone, When clouds unkind obscure the beacon star. Too long unknown the potent ore had lain, Unfelt, its power on thy doll senses fell— Bat yonder where Antareeleads hie train, His higher children feel the magnet spell.

The Lightning'e essence found perception dim, And vainly made appeal to senses slow-, Until the slaughtered frog with twitching limb Along the wire revealed the Bubble flow.

And still the poor domains within thy ken More wondrous energies in secret hold, The which though Time shall yet disclose to men, They seine but some few stragglers from the fold.

For, where the great Arcturus rules his skies, And Nature smiles with more benignant ray, To finer conscious power his children rise, And feel the thrill when feebler currents play.

And there they weave the more responsive thread Which guides through space the secret prase of Thought—.

The image of the distant form is led, And friends far sundered face to face are brought.

Canst thou, with vision coarse, the Cloud descry, Slow gathered from the Ether in the way Which mighty Sirius fires across the sky— The glowing Nebula another day ?

With clash of summoned Atoms it will burn, Throw ring on ring, send forth the living spheres, And then to Ether, whence it came, return— Shattered in war disastrous with its peers.

Disastrous P Nay, the giant crash of Sues No more distress involves in Nature's frame Than does the pigmy strain that swiftly runs, Light-bearing from the distant central frame.

An endless round of such stupendous fate Too fearful to thy timid heart appears— Nay, learn with placid mind to contemplate This never-ceasing music of the Spheres ! "

—which, so far as we can judge, is only meant to confirm the less obscure suggestion given in the previous extract, that the apt periodic collisions of various great worlds will probably renew at fixed intervals the sonnet of heat, and therefore or life, so as to prevent the uniform diffusion of' the energy which becomes effective only when there is excess in one place, and deficiency in a neighbouring place. But what the law may be by which these apt collisions are to be secured, and how it differs from that creative power of conscious intelligence, which the author seems to repudiate, be does not explain to us. His main object evidently is to suggest as many differing kinds of world as he can, in order that the dream of man that he has power to discern anything of the drift of the mighty whole, by virtue of the supposed reflection in himself of the image of his Maker, may be confounded. In a planet of the variable star Algol, the stellar travellerfound a kind of twin life in which neither of the twins can effect anything of moment, in consequence of his divorce from the other, the one being without any remembrance of the past, and the other without anyineight into the present :— " I found, moreover, the nature of the inhabitants to be as marvellously different from anything within my knowledge as the physical conditions in which they are placed, and to supply a wholly unexpected example of the transformation and conservation of the Energy of Thought. These Beings are called Dery ; and each, from the moment of his existence, is accompanied by another Being of very much finer constitution, called a Stilderg. The Stilderg is an airy Being of a phosphorescent nature, who always accompanies the Berg, the bond between them being probably of an electrical nature. In shape the farmer is an exact reproduction of the latter, and is the receptacle of all the past thoughts of the Berg. In fact, hardly has the latter conceived a thought, when this thought flies from him into his Stilderg. Hence the Bergs are Beings whose existence is almost wholly confined to the Present, while the Stildergs live essentially in the Past. The latter do not possess the power of speech, and are wholly devoid of any trace of ability to conoeive a single idea in advance of any past or present event. Their countenances are living pictures of the whole past lives of the Deign; and you may often see at a wedding ceremony, or other festive occasion, the assembled Bergs exhibiting the utmost signs of merriment, while on the countenanoes of the corresponding Stildergs are depicted the feelings of grief or anger. Such inanspiciona signs, however, produce no effect on the company, as nobody pays any attention to the Stildergs on these occasions. The latter, however, owing to their peculiar phosphorescent nature and to the fast that they live by the simple means of inhalation, possess the power of existing as isolated Beings long after death has removed their corresponding Deign, and I met several of them floating about aimlessly and expressing various phases of thought on their countenances."

This, we suppose, is our author's conception of the still-born children of Nature, for the Stilderg seems to represent nothing but the helplessness of the past severed from the present, and the Derg nothing but the helplessness of the present severed from the past. What one doe e not quite understand in why, if the "truth of Nature" be what our author imagines it, Nature does not inevitably run to waste in Dergs and Stildergs, for assuredly the number of ways in which chance.failare is con- ceivable is infinitely greater than the number of ways in which chance-success is conceivable. Professor Minchiu has a fine power of browbeating the imagination of faith, and in some of his most skilful verses he demonstrates how idle is the conception that mind will survive the strife of atoms. To the objection :— "But Knowledge were in vain, and Nature blind, If Earth's decease should all the drama close— If, after all the strife, the gains of Mind Will vanish from the field like melted snows!"

the Aldebaranite replies :—

"Yea, all indeed like melted snows will pass— For see, two molecules adjacent lie— One sinks, to rise within the blade of grass— The other joins the wandering clond on high.

Companions once, but in the ceaseless round, The wreck of Forms, thy Planet's hungry strife, Will they companions e'er again be found, Within some new development of life ?

The atoms which within thy frame unite, Immortal each, through countless Forms have been— This in a Saurian of the Oolite, That in a Mammoth of the Pliocene !

Now grouped afresh, and subtly interwined, More varied motions in thy frame cohere, More ready throb within does Nature find Whene'er her forces at the gates appear.

But finer pulses stir the vast expanse Than thy poor Sensibility can feel.

Thy Knowledge fails, and then to Fate or Chance, The Gods of Ignorance, is thy appeal.

Thy Reason—what is this ?—thy proudest boast, Which leaps the hounds of Sense and scales the height ! A flash that lures thee to the rock-bound coast And wrecks thy barque against the Infinite !"

And doubtless, if it were true that we had to choose between imagining ourselves the measure of all creation, and imagining ourselves the merest wrecks which are floated down the stream of natural phenomena, the latter would be the more reasonable assumption of the two. But that is not the alternative. We know that guidance, and guidance from above, is the very secret of our being; that the very impossibility of making for ourselves "a perfect scheme of ethics" on which our author insists, is nothing but the difficulty which a lower being finds in following the guidance of a higher being with whose nature he has a partial but not a complete or luminous sympathy, and that our variable con- ceptions of virtue and vice are nothing but the changing aspects which the effort to draw closer to a purer and higher being assumes under the varying conditions of our own finite nature. We understand fully Professor Minchin's anger at the self-conceit of the philosophy which makes man the measure of all things ; but we do not understand how he can avoid seeing that there is one philosophy which is still more misleading,—namely, that which, while it denies to man any guiding light, except the study of natural phenomena, yet expeete him to deduce from that study the obligation of sympathy with suffering, and even of in- difference to death, so long as death puts a noble end to life, which the study of natural phenomena has never yet even tended to enforce.