Primeval Man Unveiled. (Hamilton and Adams.)—This book does not prepossess
the reader. It has for a frontispioce a picture, " Scorpio and Ophiuchus," which looks like one of Zulkiel's "hieroglyphics," and as we go on, we find in it very strange notions about angels, devils, and mon. "Satan," we read, "never was in heaven," though our Lord says that ho saw him fall from thence, a passage which our author deals with, but does not, in our judgment, satisfactorily dispose of. He was the Prince of the world, as being the head "of the senior race of the world's humanity." To this senior race belonged the devils, who are the disembodied spirits of pre-Adamite men. And so the author goes on making the most audacious theories about things of which we aro commonly supposed to know nothing, till one is almost inclined to doubt his sanity. And yet when the occasion serves, when there is no hobby to be mounted and ridden, he can be sensible enough ; ho oven shows himself to have a certain ability as a thinker. His remarks, for instance, on the scientific value of the Scriptures are excellent. He argues with great force that any display of knowledge on physical subjects beyond what belonged to the time would havo been in opposition to the scheme. of revelation, and ho points out very well that there is even a remark- able absence of such display ; that where one would expect to find something of the kind, in Solomon, for instance, evidently a great natural philosopher, it is in a remarkable way suppressed. Altogether, it is a clever, but exceedingly eccentric book, which will ropey perusal, at all events perusal of the cursory kind.
Previous page
