The Day-Dawn of the Past, by an Old Etonian (Eliot
Stock), con- sists of six lectures on science and revelation as seen in Creation. They were given in the first instance in connection with a Sunday afternoon Bible class for young men, and as they are written with an amount of good sense and clear insight not always found accom- panying such labours, we are glad to welcome them in a form which will, we hope, ensure to them a still wider audience. The " Old Eto- nian" very successfully uses his own liberal education, his superior powers, and the high literary authorities at his command, to help his more restricted pupils to a wise and right judgment of the matters in hand ; and he brings the information down to the conclusions based on the researches of the Challenger,' thus including not only astronomi- cal and geological facts now fully demonstrated, but also those newer hypotheses about which the wise are still in suspense. We trust the book, which is nicely printed, and made more useful and interesting by diagrams, tables, and other engravings, will be largely bought for free libraries and those belonging to Sunday-schools. Though the writer's views about inspiration and the origin of death are broader than those more generally held, there is nothing to alarm the most orthodox, unless they be of those who cling more closely to their own early misconceptions than to the actual statements of the Scripture. That it is possible that Adam was not the first man n. ay seem startling to some, but the writer merely mentions the probability that he is only a representative head of the older dispensation, as the Second Adam is of the newer, and refers to the two first chap- ters of Genesis for confirmation of his view. There is clearly-written information, for those who have not time to search larger books for themselves, on every page of this volume ; and the style of writing is so generally good, that we cannot help wishing the author had not countenanced by his practice a growing habit which seems to us a bad one. It is that of placing adverbs between the infinitive and its preposition. "To thoroughly understand," "To closely watch," and such expressions, are now constantly used, and often with mach more disfiguring effect than by this writer, whose excellent matter would compensate for much greater faults of manner than any to be found in these pages.
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