THE MAGAZINES.

THERE is nothing very striking in the Magazines this month. There are, of course, many papers on the conflict between Lords and Commons, but we perceive little in them that has not already been said. Mr. Goldwin Smith, in the Contemporary, may, indeed, be called original ; but as his idea of meeting the crisis is to leave all legislation to the House of Commons, elect it indirectly through district councils, and appoint the Execu- tive for a fixed term of years, he does not help us much. He is a generation in advance, even if progress should follow his lines, which is not very probable. Lord Lymington considers the moment "the opportunity of the Peers," and would change them into an Electoral College, with power to select the ablest of their number for seats in the Upper House. These delegates would be reinforced by Life Peers selected from among eminent administrators, by the Chairmen of the coming County Boards, and by representatives from the Colonies. We greatly fear that a House so composite would command little respect, and would, whenever it came into conflict with the representative body, excite far more wrath than the Peers, to whom the people are, at all events, accustomed. If a great change is to be made, we must go further than that. Moreover, Lord Lymington would allow the Peers to enter the Lower House, with the inevitable result that the Upper would attract only the refuse—the men who felt themselves unequal to real debate. Mr. Maltman Barry professes to defend the action of the Lords from a Democrat's point of view, but he only repeats the usual libels,—that the Liberals desire to perpetuate their ascendancy ; that Mr. Gladstone is a lion with his tail between his legs, afraid of a dissolution ; and that Lord Salisbury ought to be supported, because he is forcing an appeal to the people against the "Ministerial crimes of the last four years." Mr. Labouchere's paper in the Fortnightly on the same sub- ject is a bright and vigorous plea for the total abolition of the Upper House, deformed by a certain extravagance of invective, as where he declares that respect for the Upper House is worse

than "the superstition of some abject negro grovelling on the banks of the Niger before a block of wood, and believing it to be God." As to the immediate difficulty, Mr. Labouchere believes it can only be overcome by a creation of Peers. Mr. A. Arnold is of the same opinion ; but would make no alteration, even the smallest, in the constitution of the House of Lords.

When they resist the Commons he would compel them to submit, but otherwise would let their authority gradu- ally die away, as he thinks it will do after the abolition of primogeniture and settlement, till the Peers themselves demand their own extinction and entrance into the effective Legislative body. The objection to that process is that it might take a century, and that this generation desires many laws which the Upper House will perish rather than pass. Lord Randolph Churchill proposes compromise,—that the Ministry should meet Parliament in October with a Redistribution Bill fully drafted, when the Peers will at once pass the Franchise Bill. But will they; or will they instruct their friends in the Commons, reinforced by all the Members whose seats may be threatened, to resist the passing of the Bill by all those methods with which Lord Randolph is so familiar ? Note that Lord Randolph repudiates the notion that the Ministry can "gerrymander " Redistribution —that is, alter boundaries for party purposes—as absurd.

The Rev. J. Guinness Rogers gives us in the Nineteenth. Century a striking account of the effect of " Chatter " in Par- liament. He believes that the time of the House of Commons is deliberately wasted with the intention of preventing work, and this mainly by fifty-six men, of whom five—Mr. Warton„ Sir H. Drummond Wolff, Lord R. Churchill, Mr. Gorst, and Mr. Labouchere—spoke 1,308 times, monopolising one-seventh of the whole talk. Twenty-four more, among whom Mr. Ash- mead-Bartlett was the greatest offender, spoke 2,483 times, and consumed 39 per cent., or more than a third of the total talking time, though among them there are certainly not more than three whom any one wishes to hear. Legislation under such circumstances is impossible ; and Mr. Rogers, therefore, is for drastic reform—a reduction of private Members' time, the relegation of Supply to an enlarged Audit Com- mittee, and the introduction of the absolute Closure. Mr. Gladstone in a recent speech at Edinburgh, obviously alluded to this paper, though he did not name it, as most instructive. Mr. F. Harrison continues his controversy with Mr. Herbert Spencer, and certainly proves that his opponent does teach that the essence of religion is belief in the Unknown and Unknowable, and this, he says, cannot be a religion. On the contrary, his own faith in humanity, he maintains, can be; but then he asserts that the essence of religion is duty, which is surely a misuse of terms. The essence of religion is telief in the sanction which makes duty at once noble and compulsory. By the way, is not Mr.

Harrison rather changing his position ? He has been supposed to teach the worship of humanity as a religion ; but he abso- lutely denies that he does this :—

"Sir James Stephen talks of Mr. Harrison's God,' of 'the shadow of a God,' and he says he would as soon 'worship' the ugliest idol in India as the human race. All this is to foist in theological ideas where none are suggested by us. Humanity is neither the shadow of God nor the substitute for God, nor has it any analogy with God. No one claims any ' godhood ' for humanity or any perfection of any kind. We do not ask anyone to worship ' it, as "Undoes worship idols, or as Christians worship God or the Virgin. If it misleads people, I am quite willing to spell humanity with a small h,' or not to use the word at all. I am quite content to speak of the human race, if that makes things clearer; I am ready to give up the word worship,' if that is a stumbling-block, and to speak of showing affection and reverence. If people mean by religion going down on their knees and invoking a supernatural being, I will wait till the word 'religion' has lost these associations."

There is, then, to be no religion; but only a general affection and reverence for all mankind. Coleridge put that in better words when he said, "He prayeth best who loveth best," and was wider than Mr. Harrison, for he included the beasts in his affection ; but benevolence, though a fine quality, is neither

religion nor a substitute for it. Mr. J. A. Cameron's sketch of the condition of the Highlanders is a striking one in view of Mr. Gladstone's promise to remedy the wrongs of the Crofters. He evidently thinks civil war rapidly approaching, the Crofters refusing to bear their misery any longer, and insisting that they are entitled to land at fair rent; and Mr. Romanes considers once more "The Darwinian Theory of Instinct." It certainly seems to no that "instinct," in any usual sense of that word, wholly fails to explain the extraordinary facts about the sphex

"There is a species of wasp-like insect, called the Sphex. This insect lays its eggs in a hole excavated in the ground. It then flies away and finds a spider, which it stings in the main nerve-centre of the animal. This has the effect of paralysing the spider without killing it. The sphex then carries the now motionless spider to its nursery, and buries it with the eggs. When the eggs hatch out the grubs feed on the paralysed prey, which is then still alive and there- fore quite fresh, although it has never been able to move since the time when it was buried. Of course the difficulty here is to under- stand how the sphex insect can have acquired so much anatomical and physiological knowledge concerning its prey as the facts imply. We might indeed suppose, as I in the first instance was led to sup- pose, that the sting of the sphex and the nerve-centre of the spider being both organs situated on the median line of their respective possessors, the striking of the nerve-centre by the sting might in the first instance have been thus accidentally favoured, and so have sup- plied a basis from which natural selection could work to the perfect- ing of an instinct always to sting in one particular spot. Bat more recently the French entomologist, M. Fabre, who first noticed these facts with reference to the stinging of the spider, has observed another species of sphex which preyed upon the grasshopper, and as the nervous system of a grasshopper is more elongated than the ner- vous system of a spider, the sphex in this case has to sting its prey in three successive nerve-centres in order to induce paralysis. Again, still more recently, M. Fabre has found another species of sphex, which preys upon a caterpillar, and in this case the animal has to sting its victim in nine successive nerve-centres."

Mr. Darwin explains the action of the sphex as the result of transmitted memory ; but, with Mr. Romanes, we feel the ex-

planation insufficient.

The best paper in the Contemporary is undoubtedly Dr. Barry's on "Science and Religion "—a most lucid, though, of course, not always novel statement of the intellectual argument against Materialism, that in the end it explains nothing :—

"Matter and motion, instead of explaining the world, cannot be themselves explained, or known even to exist, save by the higher faculties. Feeling is the whole and sole guarantee for them. If objects are material, by feeling alone do we know that there are

objects If Reason distinguishes between sense and madness, and corrects the illusions of phenomena; if states of consciousness imply a persistent Ego ; if the will acts upon matter, though in- scrutably, and may be free because not in time and space ; if we know each other, yet know not how we know, and exert our faculties though we cannot analyse them ; surely the mysterious may be real. and enter into communion with us, and be something more than the Unknowable."

The specialty of Dr. Barry in the controversy is that he admits with an absence of hesitation wonderful in a Catholic, all the statements of Science, and argues that for them to be even in- telligible one more is necessary. Granted evolution, who com- municated the living energy which drives on that mighty plan so accurately that the monad evolves thoughts, like, for ex- ample, the possibility of Ariel, which are not the result of ex- perience P There is a fine bit of criticism, by Mr. W. Clark Russell, on" Sea-Stories;" impaired, as his own sea-writings are, by too much admiration for "purple patches" about ocean and clouds ; and a gossipy sketch of the late Duke of Wellington, by Mr. Haweis. We gather from it that the Duke was one of the men who can consider nothing except in its relation to themselves. His one idea about the abolition of the Lords was that he himself was safe as Peer in half-a-dozen counties. Those who

are interested in the supernatural will be greatly comforted by the Bishop of Carlisle's "Further Thoughts on Apparitions "- an effort to prove that the subject is one exclusively for evidence, the antecedent impossibility of mental telepathy being no greater than that of physical telepathy, which, if gravitation be a reality, is admitted to exist. That proposition should weigh most with the believers in "grey matter," 8:c., as the source of thought; for he believes in a physical, though inexplicable action, which may have a physical though inexplicable relation to all similar actions.

Apart from politics, the Fortnightly is not very interesting, though Lord Cochrane's thin sketch of Chili as it is will attract many readers. It is, however, too thin, and amounts only to this, that Chili being governed under Republican forms exclusively by the rich, is well and strongly governed; that public order is perfect and property quite safe ; that the lower people are generally half-castes, with a specialty for soldiership ; and that the Araucanian Indians are a fine race at last completely

subdued. Chili has a fine climate, great natural resources—she will become, Lord Cochrane thinks, a great wine.growing country—and a partiality for foreigners, especially Englishmen. This is the account given by all foreigners, who are perplexed to account for the great difference in stability between Chili and all other South-American Republics. Mr. W. Greswell gives a sensible and moderate account of German action in South Africa, to which, like Mr. Gladstone, he raises no objection ; and Mr. Mackarness once more denounces the virtual cession of Zululand to the Boers, who are, and must remain, enemies to the Zulus. The only other paper we have read—Mr. Lilly's on "Mysticism "—is too mystical itself. A critic might fairly say that he asserts the Quaker doctrine of "indwelling light," accepting the thoughts which arise in men under certain conditions as infallibly real or true. He certainly does not intend to say that, but he presses the semi-inspiration of mystics—at least, such of them as are recognised by the Catholic Church—further than most thinkers will follow.

There is a very remarkable story in the Cornhill called "The Curate of Churnside," intended to show that no man, however highly cultivated and trained, can escape the influence of the natural or instinctive conscience. It is well worked out, though injured by the assumption necessary to the plot that a man by nature tender-hearted and loving could be so self-absorbed as to commit a cruel murder for gain, and would not be defended even by self-respect from forgery.

In Macmillan, Mr. Trail! gives us a dialogue between Lord Sandwich and Wilkes, mainly on the Bradlaugh case, which is not one of his happiest efforts, Lord Sandwich being too consciously cynical, and Wilkes inclined to prose ; and Pro- fessor Mahaffy an almost fantastic essay on "The Decay of Genius." Is it decayed P Let Mr. Mahaffy run over the list of poets, statesmen, men of science, and mechanicians of his own time, and reconsider. Mr. Morley, in his "Review of the Mouth," pronounces the just opinion that nothing but the enormous influence of Mr. Gladstone's personality now keeps Liberals from placing the abolition of the Upper House in the forefront of their programme.