Sir John Lubbock has been lecturing at Edinburgh on Savages,
—the subject of which we described his treatment last week in the review of his " Prehistoric Times,"—and at the end of his second lecture he took occasion to administer a well-deserved and severe rebuke to Lord Justice Clerk Moncreiff. That learned person seems to have said, in a lecture delivered last year, that the modern men of science "care far less for the discoveries of science for their own sake, than they do for for the, to them, not unpleasing idea that they are helping to supply a lever which is to upset the faith of the world ;" and he had pointed distinctly at Sir John Lubbock, Sir Charles Lyell, Professors Huxley, Darwin, and others. Sir John Lubbock very rightly and very severely censured this marvellous piece of bigotry. We differ very widely from some of these gentlemen on the subject of religious faith, and have often expressed our differences, but to say that they do not care for truth so much as for the incidental shock of their theories to popular religious beliefs, seems to us the most grotesque of libels. Does any sane man accumulate experiment after experiment of the most exquisitively refined kind, on the nature of heat for instance, like Professor Tyndall, only in the hope that some remote i "1 fence from the laws established may upset the story of Shadracli, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace ? or would Sir John Lubbock laboriously array all the evidence bearing on the Stone Ages and the condition of modern savages, only in order to throw doubts upon Adam (who, by the way, evidently had not the use of metals, certainly wore as little clothing as native Australians, and probably used bone needles for his first tailoring)? Charges of this sort are like boomerangs, apt to recoil upon those who make them.
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