From about 1830 to 1850 the old metaphysical reign seems to have ceased; and Jeffrey, in the palmy days of the _Edinburgh Review_, could declare that the interest in psychology had well-nigh passed away with Dugald Stewart. Natural Science seemed to be taking its place, and the British Association movement lent impetus to the new _régime_. Sedgwick, Buckland, Murchison, Owen, and others, followed by Huxley and Tyndall, appeared to herald the advent of an age when the most difficult problems could be read off the book of Nature, and the public turned eagerly from the Babel of the philosophers to the men of the new school in a sort of expectation of a royal road to learning, without missing their way in theological jungle or 'skirting the howling wastes' of metaphysics. Needless to say, the hopes were no more realised than were the expectations of a golden age of material prosperity in the wake of the Reform Bill. The problem of man and his destiny remains as rooted as ever, and the metaphysician has not been dislodged. The old battle of the evidences had been fought in the domain of mental science, and when transferred to the natural sciences the fight was not productive of the expected results. The times, as Richter said, were indeed 'a criticising critical time, hovering between the wish and the ability to believe, a chaos of conflicting times: but even a chaotic world must have its centre, and revolve round that centre: there _is_ no pure entire confusion, but all such presupposes its opposite, before it can begin.' In Scotland and in England the great ecclesiastical currents of the Disruption and the Oxford Movement had left the nation for a time weary of theology, and the school of natural science was in possession of the field. Now the tide has turned, and the geologist is threatened with eclipse. Of the _doyen_ of the new school, Richard Owen, Professor Huxley says:--'Hardly any of those speculations and determinations have stood the test of investigation. I am not sure that any one but the historian of anatomical science is ever likely to recur to them. Obvious as are the merits of Owen's anatomical and palæontological work to every expert, it is necessary to be an expert to discuss them; and countless pages of analysis of his memoirs would not have made the general reader any wiser than he was at first.' Even Buckland is regarded by Boyd Dawkins as belonging to a type of extinct men. Thus is the deposition effected of the scientific Pope of the day. If such rapid supersession be the law, who can expect in departing to leave footprints in the annals of so shifting a science? Who can be a fixed star?