long works. Nearly all of our younger writers are very shortwinded, and, what Mr. Harte is not, very slight. Why is it that no American author nowadays can write a long, workmanlike, and stupid tale like Cooper's "Deerslayer"? This inability of our young writers is due perhaps to the weakness which comes of self-consciousness; they never finish anything till they have first looked at it from without; they start at their own shadow when they catch sight of it on the wall; a sentence not in perfect dress is recalled and made fit to appear in company. Indeed, the best contemporary writers both here and in England are rather exact than full. The epistles to the cantos of "Marmion," for instance, contain descriptions which would seem very loose and vague to a modern artist, and perhaps are so; but Scott was full of generous and lovely sentiments, and it is these the reader feels through, and perhaps in spite of, his careless phrases.

In the play which Mr. Harte brought out last autumn in New York the author did not of course mean to produce a work which should rival the masterpieces of Goldsmith and Sheridan. But, of course, he wished to write a play which people would like to go to see. Now any comedy must have at least one pair of lovers whom the audience desire to have married. Mr. Harte's play had two or three pairs of lovers, but each of them was so presented that nobody cared whether they were married or not. Lovers in plays must be unexceptionable. There are certain ideal, perhaps sentimental and conventional, requirements to which they must be made to conform. A hero who would do very well in a novel might not do at all on the stage. Young ladies are much more particular concerning lovers in plays than lovers in novels, infinitely more particular than they are concerning their own. Mr. Harte's lovers did not conform at all to the ideal requirements. One would fancy that it could not be difficult to have in a play a pair of lovers to whom some kind of languid interest would attach. The interest need not be very great; if the audience would rather have the play end well than badly, it would be enough. The Chinaman was very funny, and Starbottle was amusing; a few more of the people in "Mliss" and "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" could have been brought in; but the thread of the story should have been given to a few characters drawn solely with a view to have the audience interested that the play should end well. A great many

things were in the play which Mr. Boucicault would have left out. It is one of Mr. Boucicault's principles, I am told, that an audience should not be surprised, and he refrains from doing this for the very good reason that they do not like to be surprised. The coming point must not be made too plain, but the audience must be prepared for it and permitted to suspect it. When a surprise is sprung upon them, they think the new point arbitrary and unnatural. In "Two Men of Sandy Bar" the audience were at no time able to judge what was coming; they were often surprised, and always bewildered; there was no story, or one which it would have been as hard as a sum in algebra to get straight; the aim appeared to be to get in everything, and to contrive a plot which would be a thin and intricate theory of the conduct of the characters. The play, of course, made no pretensions to be a literary effort; I only speak of it here because it showed the same want either of judgment or of industry which is shown in "Gabriel Conroy," the same confusion and helplessness when the author sits down before a long story and a great many facts.

The style of Mr. Harte is very incorrect and imperfect. This is a much graver fault than the want of ability to sustain a character through a prolonged description. Mr. Harte is not under the least obligation to write long stories; but he cannot write at all without using words. Why should he choose to express himself in the shabby style of the newspapers? He has not a proper sense that his fine thoughts deserve to be expressed with perfection. It would seem to be only necessary to perfectly conceive a thought to be able to express it well; the thought should be the thread by which one should be able to find his way out of the labyrinth of a bad style. Why should Mr. Harte use such a phrase as "moral atmosphere" to denote a thought which could be so much more elegantly expressed by plain words? No kind of phrase is so poor and feeble as an exploded figure of speech; unless a figure can be used which will express the thought with novel truth, the thought should be expressed in plain words. Those figures of speech which people have forgotten are usually inelegant, and often indicate that the writer does not know quite what he would say. A newspaper writer in haste for a phrase may seize one of them gratefully; but one who is writing a page containing a conception which he thinks worthy to be perfectly

expressed should avoid them. But Mr. Harte's thoughts are so good, the images in his mind are so original, that his works are certain to fascinate the reader in spite of the slovenly mannerism of his writing. One of the bad results of an inferior style and of a want of proper reticence in a writer is that the reader who has read but a little of him is likely to conceive a mean opinion of him. It is necessary to read a great deal of Mr. Harte to have a right opinion of his works. They form together a picture of the life, landscape, and society which the author saw in his youth; the picture lies in the author's mind as a whole, and should so lie in the reader's mind; a thought or image of Mr. Harte's which, taken by itself, might appear to be of no great significance, will become much more interesting when it is seen as part of this picture.

Ir is not often that the propounder of a new and startling scientific theory has lived to see his daring innovations accepted by the scientific world in general. Harvey's great discovery of the circulation of the blood was scoffed at for nearly a whole generation; and Newton's law of gravitation, though proved by the strictest mathematical proof, received from many eminent men but a slow and grudging acquiescence. Even Leibnitz, who as a mathematician hardly inferior to Newton himself might have been expected to be convinced on simple inspection of the theory, was prevented from accepting it by the theological objection that it appeared to substitute the action of a physical force for the direct action of the Deity. In France, where ideas not of French origin are very apt to be but slowly apprehended, the opposition to the Newtonian theory was not silenced till 1759, when Clairaut and Lalande, by calculating the retardation of Halley's comet, furnished such crucial proof as could not possibly be overcome. At this time Newton had been thirty-two years in his grave; seventytwo years had elapsed since the publication of the "Principia," and ninety-four since the hypothesis was first definitely conceived.

In the present age, when the number of scientific inquirers has greatly increased and the interchange of thoughts has become rapid and constant, it takes much less time for a new generalization to make its way into people's minds. It is now barely eighteen years since Mr. Darwin's views on the origin of species were announced in a book which purported to be only the rough preliminary sketch of a greater work in course of preparation. But, though greeted at the beginning with ridicule and opprobrium, the theory of natural selection has already won a complete and overwhelming victory. One could count on one's fingers the number of eminent naturalists who still decline to adopt it, and the hesitancy of these appears to be determined in the main by theological or metaphysical, and therefore not strictly relevant, objections. But it is not simply that the great body of naturalists have accepted the Darwinian theory: it has become part and parcel of their daily thoughts, an element in every investigation which cannot be got rid of. With a tacit consent that is almost unanimous, the classificatory relations among plants and animals have come to be recognized as representing degrees of genetic kinship. One needs but to read constantly such scientific journals as "Nature," or to peer into the proceedings of scientific societies, to see how thoroughly all contemporary inquiry is permeated by the conception of natural selection. The record of research, whether in embryology, in palæontology, or in the study of the classification and distribution of organized beings, has come to be the registration of testimony in support of Mr. Darwin's hypothesis. So deeply, indeed, has this mighty thinker impressed his thoughts on the mind of the age that in order fully to unfold the connotations of the word "Darwinism" one could hardly stop short of making an index to the entire recent literature of the organic sciences. The sway of natural selection in biology is hardly less complete than that of gravitation in astronomy; and thus it is probably true that no other scientific discoverer has within his own lifetime obtained so magnificent a triumph as Mr. Darwin.

The comparison of the doctrine of natural selection with the Newtonian theory is made advisedly, as I wish to call attention to some differences in the aspect of the proofs by which two such different hypotheses are established. First, however, as the point will not hereafter come up for consideration in this paper, it may

be well to notice the theological objection which has been urged against Mr. Darwin, as it was once urged against Newton, and to show briefly why, as above hinted, it cannot be regarded as properly relevant to the discussion of the scientific hypothesis. The theological objection to natural selection, which has weight with many minds, is precisely the same objection that Leibnitz made to gravitation, that the action of physical forces appears to be substituted for the direct action of the Deity. This has, indeed, been a very common objection to theories which enlarge and define what is called the action of secondary causes, but it has been peculiarly unfortunate in this respect, that with the progress of inquiry it has invariably been overruled without practical detriment to theism. It regularly happens that the so-called atheistical theory becomes accepted as part and parcel of science, and yet men remain as firm theists as ever. The objection is, therefore, evidently fallacious, and the fallacy is not difficult to point out. It lies in a metaphysical misconception of the words "force" and "cause." "Force" is implicitly regarded as a sort of entity or dæmon which has a mode of action distinguishable from that of universal Deity; otherwise it is meaningless to speak of substituting the one kind of action for the other. But such a personification of "force" is a remnant of barbaric thought, and is in no wise sanctioned by physical science. When astronomy speaks of two planets as attracting each other with a "force" which varies directly as their masses and inversely as the squares of their distances apart, it simply uses the phrase as a convenient metaphor by which to describe the manner in which the observed movements of the two bodies occur. It explains that in presence each other the two bodies are observed to change their positions in a certain specified way, and this is all that it means. This is all that a strictly scientific hypothesis can possibly allege, and this is all that observation can possibly prove. Whatever goes beyond this and imagines or asserts a kind of "pull" between the two bodies, is not science but metaphysics. An atheistic metaphysics may imagine such a "pull," and may interpret it as the "action" of something that is not Deity, but such a conclusion can find no support in the scientific theorem, which is simply a generalized description of phenomena. The general considerations upon which the belief in the existence and direct action of Deity are otherwise

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