The exploration of the Italian soil has caused many chapters of Roman history to be rewritten more in accordance with the older traditions than with the newer learning. Like processes near the sites of Babylon and Nineveh have done much to vindicate the authors of the Pentateuch as chroniclers of fact; and have even created a reaction in favour of the Mosaic cosmogony, and the sacred narrative of the Deluge. Evolution as a philosophy is not altogether rejected by physicists of orthodoxy so unimpeachable as Mr St. George Mivart. More lately it has been discovered that an Anglican divine may keep an open mind on the subject of Darwinism and yet be made Archbishop of Canterbury. To the unlearned English vulgar the question is whether the visible universe and its inhabitants are more likely to have developed themselves by a series of indescribable processes than to have developed, as the Scriptural tradition has been interpreted as teaching, by a Power external to them and directing every stage of their progress. If it be said that evolution is the method in which that superhuman Power who is behind and above all often chooses to act, there is no reason why the occupant of Lambeth should not be as good an evolutionist as the scientific investigator whose nearest country neighbour at Down, Sir John Lubbock, appropriately presided over the Jubilee meeting of the British Association at York. The transformations effected in other departments of physical study during our age are not less remarkable. Many of them have been appreciably assisted by the social intercourse of mind with mind which the British Association has so signally promoted. Lyell's _Principles of Geology_ was published in pre-Association days and seven years before the Victorian age began. Its influence was in the same direction as that of Darwin; it suggested, that is, the enquiry why the natural processes that are said to explain the globe we inhabit should not explain also the presence of man upon it. Biology and anthropology, the two studies which have most been promoted by the Darwinian doctrine, can consequently be pronounced with truth the creations of the present age. As far back as Elizabethan times, electrical phenomena had been systematically studied. Many of these manifestations, however, especially their relations with heat and light, as well as most of their adaptations to the offices of daily life, belong to the era that opened in 1837. Photography of course was an unknown art in pre-Victorian days. Even when its predecessor, the Daguerreotype, discovered in 1839, had been considerably improved upon, it still remained a contrivance rather for distorting the human features than for faithfully reproducing them as photography does upon glass or paper, and with the addition of natural colours as photography now bids fair soon to have done.