On his return to Cambridge he was welcomed by the first scholars of the day, who crowded to hear his "Lectures on Latin Synonyms," and to profit from his clear expositions of the grammatical and etymological structure of the speech of Rome. In 1856 he issued a pamphlet on "Classical Scholarship and Classical Learning, considered with Special Reference to Competition Tests and University Teaching." In this same year, by the strong support of Mr. Grote, the historian of Greece and the expositor of Plato, he was chosen examiner in classics for the London University, and through the help of other friends he was advanced to a similar position among the Civil Service Examinators. In labours connected with these departments of effort, in recasting and revising his "New Cratylus" and "Varronianus," as well as in preparing for production of a " New Greek and English Lexicon," his time was much employed, and he withdrew from the fierce wars of theology. But the crowd of labours in which he was engaged demanded exertions beyond his strength. His fine physique failed, and his brain yielded to the pressure of numerous cares and sad anxieties. A tour in Germany, in 1860, undertaken in the hope of restoration, failed to ease the neuralgic pains, or stay the progress of the disease that saps the power of effort in the overtaxed brain.

66

He was appointed one of the examiners for the Classical Tripos in Cambridge, an honour richly won by the fame he had brought to his university, as well as highly merited on account of the efforts he had made to elevate the standard of acquisition among her graduates. After his return to Cambridge he settled down to his work, though most of his friends saw in his appearance symptoms of declining power and health. He himself felt that a message had been sent. He had conquered in himself the fear of death, he could not prevent the pain of dying. He had been accused by clerical foes of being false to the Christian faith; but he fronted the last enemy in a strength due to faith in Christ. While he felt the injustice of the measure which had been meted to him in life, he knew that mercy from on high had been meted to him by One who knew the frailties of the human heart and intellect, and frame. He saw life and immortality through the chinks and fissures of his decaying tabernacle; but it was not for him to faint in the hour of duty, it was his to work in the harness of toilful and responsible offices. He went to London to attend to his duties as examiner in the London University, but the damp of death was already gathering on him, and the dutiful heart was beginning to feel the oncoming of the seizure which should reduce it to dull dust. He went to his mother's house with the pangs of death upon him, and quite unfitted for any exertion. For four weeks he wrestled with death-a calm, resolute, dutiful wrestling for power to do what he ought, and to effect what he meant; but gradually his eye began to see in the future more to be wished for, in the past less to regret, and resignation came into his soul. On the 10th Feb. 1861,-a sabbath day,-the rest of death reached

him, and all the battles of his baffled hopes were over, while not half a century of life had been granted him to make, to use, and to reproduce all those researches which by toil of brain and sweat of soul he had so honestly and earnestly pursued. So is it ever; the work of life is interrupted by the advent of death, and the soul passes over

"That awful gulf no mortal e'er repassed

To tell what's doing on the other side."

We admire in Donaldson the sublime persistency of his character in following out the early decision of his spirit to combine modern thoughts and old scholarship in one fresh living compound. His ardent temper and his ceaseless toil, the energy of his activity and the determinativeness of his principles, led him to overtask and overtax his powers of body; and in his endeavour to still the disquietude of his grieved spirit by thoughtful industry which would keep him above the world, he shortened his tenure of earthly existence. But the spirit of his life, the good old English pluck of the man, is best seen when he stood an alien, with the brand of heresy upon his name, in the church he loved, and whose honours and emoluments he was fitted to hold, and beheld his loved and loving pupils pass from the door of his class-room never to enter it to him again, because he was decreed an unsafe guide in articles of faith; when he saw all this, and bore up against it in love of truth and honesty of conviction, and with all his old habits of life unsettled, he gave himself to new labours for human good. How great in his humility he retrod the Halls of Cambridge, and with the light of genius and study in his eye poured out in its lecture-rooms the treasures of his well-stored mind! And when the flickering of the lamp of life too truly-giving way before the constancy of use to which it was subject-told him of a career of glory shortened, and drew the blank veil of death over his prospects, how patiently he bore the disappointing intelligence, and how modestly he bowed his head before the august Disposer of each human lot! We may learn alike from the errors and the glories of men. From him let us learn to avoid the waste of life, the over-toil of ambitious suggestions; but from him, too, let us learn, if need be, to sacrifice life itself sooner than quit the pathways of duty and truth; as well as to die in humble trust and piety that the great Onlooker will recognize hereafter each true servant of His whose life has been spent in "toiling upward.' R. M. A.

The Eloquence of the Month.

DAVID PAGE ON "GEOLOGY AND MODERN

THOUGHT."

MR. DAVID PAGE, F.R.S.E., F.G.S., Vice-President of the Edinburgh Geological Society, closed the meetings of session 1865-6 with an address on the relations of Geology to Modern Thought, in the Religious Institution Rooms, St. Andrew's Square, 19th June.

Mr. Page is favourably known as one the best popularizers of geological science and geographical knowledge. His text-books in these branches of learning occupy the very first place among works of that order. He is a man of great general culture, and is editor of several selections of poetry. He is not only widely and well known as an able lecturer, but is besides a favourite contributor to the higher periodical literature of our age.

Mr. Page, before reading the paper, intimated that he did so at the request of their venerable president, Mr. Charles Maclaren, who was unable to attend the meeting, but he was not aware whether Mr. Maclaren would endorse the views he meant to express. He then proceeded as follows:-"We hear a great deal at present about the tendencies of modern thought.' Let us see how far this newer thought has been influenced by the teachings of geology. Such a subject may seem at first sight to have little connection with the plain facts and practical observation which form the main business of our winter sittings; but as the highest aim of all science is the furtherance of human progress, so it is good for us now and then to pause and inquire how far the special department we cultivate is concerned in this development. On this ground I have chosen the present topic of address, believing that geological discovery has exerted direct and beneficial influences in the development of modern thought and feeling, and because these influences in certain quarters have been misapprehended and opposed, it is our duty as geologists to do what we can to remove these misapprehensions."

We quote the remainder textually :

By "modern thought" is meant, I presume, the ideas now entertained respecting the nature of man and his relation to the universe, in contradistinction to the opinions that were held by our more immediate predecessors. One notable feature of this thought is the view now entertained of the age of our planet, and the processes by which its crust has been moulded into its present form. The six or seven thousand years believed in by our forefathers is now a thing of the past; and if it remains at all, it is only among those who are unfortunately debarred by their position from this newer knowledge; or, still more unfortunately, among those who are obstinately unwilling to acquire it. The numerous formations-aqueous and igneous-which compose the earth's crust, the gradual processes by which

they have been accumulated, the successive races of plants and animals entombed within their strata, and the repeated oscillations of sea and land which these formations imply, all point to an inconceivable lapse of ages during which our planet has existed under its present ordainings. To question this high antiquity-whatever may have been the views of our forefathers-would be to shut our eyes to the most obvious facts, and to oppose the clearest inferences reason ever deduced from the phenomena of nature. And with this knowledge of a higher antiquity have also arisen other opinions as to the secondary processes by which the earth has assumed its existing form and appointments. Less than a century ago, the instantaneous creation of the solid framework of the earth was a matter of almost universal belief; now every man of ordinary education knows that the rocky crust has been gradually formed by aqueous and igneous agencies, that it has undergone a thousand modifications, and is still under the operation of these forces, and passing on to other and newer aspects. At the same period, the existing seas and continents were regarded as the lands and waters originally separated at the creation; now, every one acquainted with the rudiments of geology is aware that sea and land have repeatedly changed places, and are even now gradually passing on to other distributions, with necessarily other climates and other vegetable and animal appointments. So far, then, as concerns the antiquity of our globe, and the simultaneous creation of its rocky exterior, modern knowledge and ancient belief are wide as the poles asunder. By the latter the formation of the world was regarded as an act recent, instantaneous, and accomplished; by the former it is received as a work of unknown beginning, gradual in development, and still in progress.

With this belief in the recentness of the world, our forefathers had no true conception of the creational order and succession of vegetable and animal existences. A vague notion, to be sure, prevailed as to the appearance of higher and higher forms within the space of one or two creative days; but at that time geology had not revealed the long and orderly ascent from lower to higher races; nor had it shown that during the vast ages of this ascent thousands of species and genera had become extinct, and that the plants and animals now living were but the merest fraction in comparison with those that had utterly perished. According to the belief of our forefathers, the flora and fauna now inhabiting the world were identical with those by which it was originally peopled. It was admitted that there had been growth, and reproduction, and decay; but no idea was entertained that whole families and orders had become extinct; nor was it even dreamt that the existing races of plants and animals were so widely different in form and character from those that had gone before them. Geology has thrown an entirely new light on the science of life; and modern philosophy has now to deal not merely with existing plants and animals, but with those found in a fossil state in the earth's crust, and which bear, in many instances, but a slender resemblance to those that surround us. How wide the field that botany and zoology have now to traverse! How different our notions of the great scheme of life compared with those that were entertained by the most accomplished biologists even at the commencement of the current century! Former notions were exclusively restricted to living forms; modern thought takes a wider range, embraces past and present, traces newer affinities, and arrives at other views of geographical distribution and functional performance. And who dare gainsay that, with broader and more accurate knowledge of nature, will arise higher and sounder conceptions of the God of nature?

Again, believing in the six or seven thousand years of the world's existence, the antiquity of man was necessarily limited by our forefathers to the same duration. Neither plants nor animals could, of course, be older than the globe on which they

were placed; and thus all the remains of life, all the dispersions of races, all the rises and declines of nationalities, and all the concrete progress of civilization were restricted to these six or seven thousand years. By-and-bye, however, as geology began to unfold the numerous successions of plants and animals, and the cycles required for their development, and as explorers began to discover the remains of man and his works in certain formations, which, in the ordinary course of nature, could not have been deposited within the received chronology, a new light broke in upon modern thought, and most people are now prepared to admit that man, in one or other of his varieties, may have been an inhabitant of this earth for thousands of centuries. By this newer notion freer scope has been given to the reasonings of the ethnologist, the philologist, and the historian, and many anomalies in the variation and dispersion of the human race are likely the sooner to receive a more philosophical and satisfactory solution. It has been said (as it has been said of many other subjects that engage the human mind) that it matters little to the business of life whether man has existed on this earth for six thousand or for sixty thousand years. Let us beware, however, how we entertain such an argument. If knowledge were sought after only for its material results, man would indeed know little, and desire to know still less. Indifference is too often, in science as in morals, the first and facile step to error and degradation.

Still further, as paleontology has shown an orderly progression in time from lower to higher forms, and this in a way that closely accords with the ordinal rank that prevails among living plants and animals, the question has naturally arisen, Has this progression been the result of successive creations, or has it been brought about by some secondary law of gradual development? Much, it must be admitted, has been written on both sides, but the acrimony with which the subject was discussed some twelve or fifteen years ago has died away-it has become an 66 'open question," which may be treated from a philosophical standpoint; and now perhaps the majority of qualified naturalists are beginning to lean to the opinion that the entire vital scheme-animal as well as vegetableis genetically connected by some process of developmental descent. They perceive that life is intimately associated with the physical conditions of the universe, and throughout these physical conditions they trace only the operation of secondary causation; hence the fair inference seems to be that life, like the conditions on which it is dependent, is under a similar mode of causation and the operation of natural law. Such a process of development being admitted-no matter how difficult it may be to trace it in all its ramifications,-man must be genetically connected with the antecedent forms of life, and the man of the present day must excel the man of the past, just as the man of the future will excel, physically and intellectually, the man of the present. If there be a law of progressive development, such must be its inevitable result; and this new idea of progression, originating with geology, has already done much to influence the tone of modern thought and modern philosophy. The science of anthropology, or the study of man as a branch of natural history, has been one of its immediate results; and much will yet flow from that study, both in a philosophical and practical aspect. Observe that, however man may have originated, it does not alter his position in the scale of being. It is no degradation to have been descended from some antecedent form of life, any more than it is an exaltation to have been formed directly from the dust of the earth. He lives, and breathes, and is dependent on physical conditions as much as the lowest creature with which he is associated in the scheme of life. His position depends not upon the physical life which he shares in common with other animals, but upon his intellectual nature; and this in either way can only be resolved into a newer and higher creational endowment.