It is not a difficult thing, nor does it require much wisdom, to harry a man whose independent thinking and moral earnestness have forced him to take a different attitude toward some great question from that which is adopted by the multitude. It is easy to present his views in an invidious light, but a more useful task would be to show that all that is essential and precious in religious belief can exist as well in a philosophical as in a popular form. With such a thesis it may not be quite so easy to "score," but it is a pity when the standards of the reporters' room invade the desk of the literary or theological editor. It is upon such men as we have mentioned, men of competent scholarship and earnest spirit, that the task is laid of purifying and liberating the religious consciousness of the age; and we do not hesitate to say that when, from the vantage height of modern knowledge, they affirm with deep conviction the indestructibleness of the religious sentiment and the everlasting reality of its object, they render a service which, from a religious point of view, can not be overestimated. Scientific Literature. SPECIAL BOOKS. In a stout volume[G] of nearly a thousand pages Mr. _Jackson_, the leader of the Jackson-Harmsworth Polar Expedition of 1894-'97, puts into permanent form the record of three years' observations made in Franz-Josef Land, a region beyond the eightieth parallel of latitude, which was accidentally made known to the world twenty years before by the drift of the Tegethoff, the ill-fated vessel of the Austrian expedition of Payer and Weyprecht. As such it is a substantial contribution to arctic literature, and from it much important detail will be obtained by those seeking further adventure in the quest for the pole, and a mass of material, geographic and otherwise, pertaining to the region which forms the subject of the work before us. The meteorological data, covering as they do a longer continuous period of observation in the extreme North than has heretofore been possible, and fittingly supplementing those recorded by Nansen for an almost equal period, will be specially prized by the scientist, even if the facts of the air are not considered to be the main object of arctic research. It is interesting to note, from the observations on temperature, that the lowest record was only -46° F., the extreme rigor, consequently, being only that of Dakota or Manitoba, and marking nearly fifty degrees above what has been observed a thousand miles farther to the south at Verkhoyansk, in Siberia. Nothing approaching the extreme cold (-72°) noted by Kane and by the Nares British Expedition of 1875-'76 has thus been recorded by Nansen, Peary, or Jackson. [Footnote G: A Thousand Days in the Arctic. By Frederick G. Jackson, Knight, First Class, of the Royal Order of St. Olaf, etc. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1899.]