[9] Like the ingenious author of the "Origin of Species," Miss Phantasia appears to have convinced herself that the time would come when the absence or rarity of intermediate species, the great stumbling-block in the grand Darwinian theory, would no longer have to be accounted for negatively by the "poorness of our palæontalogical collections," and the "imperfectness of the genealogical record." Bacon, though apparently familiar with, and not averse to, Mr. Darwin's theory of evolution, does not seem to follow the doctrine out in its application to the human race. How many errors remain to be eradicated, even in minds of the highest order, through man's adopted notion that he stands exclusively apart from all his natural surroundings, both in degree and in kind! T. [10] It is but fair to say that the apparatus of Léon Scott for registering the vibrations produced by the voice in singing had preceded the discovery of Reis. Scott's "phonautograph" is fully described, both in construction and working, in Ganot's Treatise on Physics (Atkinson's translation, p. 211, etc.) T. [11] It is embarrassing to render the original German coinage humanität, which, we believe, is due to the grand idea of Lessing, but it is a decided fallacy, current even among literati, that the absence of a certain word in a certain language indicates the absence of the idea embodied in the word among the nations by whom that language is spoken. This vulgar error, the prolific source of so many idle boasts, and unjust charges, and national vanities, we have endeavoured to refute in a paper on "The Philosophy of Verbal Monopoly," printed in the "Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Art, Science, and Literature," 1868. T. [12] So little do we know of a country so worth knowing, that we daily commit ourselves by speaking of it as Holland. The kingdom of the Netherlands, as now constituted, is divided into ten counties or provinces, and two of these are respectively called North and South Holland. The former is the territory here alluded to; it includes neither Leiden, nor the Hague, nor Rotterdam. To speak of the Netherlands as Holland, corresponds to calling England Devonshire or Cheshire, and this particular terminology is the more amusing to the natives because with them it is a shibboleth of vulgarity. There never was a kingdom of Holland, except from 1806-1810, under Napoleonic rule, when the Dutch had lost their independence through that most dangerous scourge of nations, internal division. T. [13] The Dutch adopted the metric system for weights and measures simultaneously with the French; that is to say, at the close of the eighteenth century. Their meter is little more than three English feet. T.