influence at home and abroad, so subtly penetrating as to resemble in scale and intimacy the silent forces of nature. It was great as a representative of the spirit of rationalism, which it supported and spread with incalculable results on the temper of educated Europe; and great also as a product and embodiment of that cold, intellectual habit, distinctive of a certain kind of English mind, and usually regarded as radical in the race. It was great by the variety as well as the range of its influence, and was felt in all regions of abstract thought and those practical arts, education, government and the like, then most affected by such thought; it permanently modified the cast of men's minds. In opposition to it new philosophical movements found their mainspring. A similar honor belongs to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in another century. It is customary to eulogize the pioneer, and to credit the first openers of Californias with the wealth of all the mines worked by later comers; and, in this sense, the words of Buckle, that have been placed opposite the title-page, are, perhaps, to be taken: "Adam Smith contributed more, by the publication of this single work, towards the happiness of men than has been effected by the united abilities of all the statesmen and legislators of whom history has preserved an authentic account." But the excess of the statement is a proof of the largeness of the truth it contains, and like-minded praise is not from Buckle alone, but may be found in half a score of thoughtful and temperate authors. In the last age, Darwin, by his Origin of Species, most arrested the attention of the scientific mind, and stimulated the highly educated world with surprise. He was classed with Copernicus, as having brought man's pretension to be the first of created things, and their lord from the beginning, under the destroying criticism of scientific time and its order, in the same way that Copernicus brought the pretension of the earth to be the centre of the universe under a like criticism of scientific space and its order; and in these proud statements there is some measure of truth. The ideas of Darwin compel a readjustment of man's thoughts with regard to his temporal and natural relation to the universe in which he finds himself; and the vast generalities of all evolutionary thought received from Darwin immense stimulus, its method greater scope, and its results a firmer hold on the general mind, with an influence still unfathomable upon man's highest beliefs with regard to his origin and destiny. There are epochs in the intellectual history of the race as marked as those of the globe; and such works as these, in the literature of knowledge, show the times of the opening of the seals.