It would be easy to poke fun at this disorderly and indignant tract; even, perhaps, to denounce the learned author, in a lofty manner, as a mere jackass. His argument, at more than one place, is so shaky that it tempts ribaldry with a powerful lure, almost a suction. His premisses are often gratuitous and absurd; his conclusions are often fantastic. Worse, he argues in circles, and it is frequently hard to make out what he is advocating, and why. Worst of all, the urbanity suitable to a learned gentleman resident in Sparks street, Cambridge, Mass., sometimes yields to a libido far more suitable to an auctioneer, a Federal district attorney or a Methodist bishop, and he rants dreadfully. But against all this there is yet something to be said, and that something, I think, is sufficient to stay the impulse to have at him brutally, either with cackles or with invective. It is, in brief, this: that what he inveighs against, given his natural and laudable prejudices, is plentifully sufficient to excuse all his indignation, and all his incoherence, and even his occasional departures from the strict letter of the record--that it is a merit in any man, facing what he deems to be incubi and succubi, to belabor them in a hearty and vociferous manner, and without too pedantic a respect for the rules of evidence. That merit has nothing to do, at bottom, with his rightness or wrongness; it lies in his mere sincerity. Dr. Abbott is obviously full of sincerity; no fair reader can doubt it for an instant. But he has something more: he has under him a respectable body of facts, sound ones as well as shaky ones. The deductions he draws from them are often extravagant, and now and then he mingles them with assumptions that seems to me to do violence to the most elemental common sense. Nevertheless, his basic facts remain, and if I were an Anglo-Saxon as he is I suspect that they would fever me as they fever him.