As affording a definite chronology, of course such calculations as these are of no value; but they have much use in fixing one's attention upon a possible minimum. A man may be puzzled if he is asked how long Rome took a-building; but he is proverbially safe if he affirms it not to have been built in a day;-and our geological calculations are all, at present, pretty much on that footing.

A second consideration which the study of the coal brings prominently before the mind of any one who is familiar with paleontology is, that the coal Flora, viewed in relation to the enormous period of time which it lasted, and to the still vaster period which has elapsed since it flourished, underwent little change while it endured, and, in its peculiar characters, differs strangely little from that which at present exists.

The same species of plants are to be met with throughout the whole thickness of a coal-field, and the youngest are not sensibly different from the oldest. But more than this. Notwithstanding that the carboniferous period is separated from us by more than the whole time represented by the secondary and tertiary formations, the great types of vegetation were as distinct then as now. The structure of the modern club-moss furnishes a complete explanation of the fossil remains of the Lepidodendra, and the fronds of some of the ancient ferns are hard to distinguish from existing ones. At the same time, it must be remembered, that there is nowhere in the world, at present, any forest which bears more than a rough analogy with a coal-forest. The types may remain, but the details of their form, their relative proportions, their associates, are all altered. And the tree-fern forest of Tasmania, or New Zealand, gives one only a faint and remote image of the vegetation of the ancient world.

Once more, an invariably-recurring lesson of geological history, at whatever point its study is taken up: the lesson of the almost infinite slowness of the modification of living forms. The lines of the pedigrees of living things break off almost before they begin to

converge.

Finally, yet another curious consideration. Let us suppose that one of the stupid, salamander-like Labyrinthodonts, which pottered, with much belly and little leg, like Falstaff in his old age, among the coal-forests, could have had thinking power enough in his small brain to reflect upon the showers of spores which kept on falling through years and centuries, while perhaps not one in ten million fulfilled its apparent purpose, and reproduced the organism which gave it birth, surely he might have been excused for moralizing upon the thoughtless and wanton extravagance which Nature displayed in her operations.

But we have the advantage over our shovel-headed predecessoror possibly ancestor-and can perceive that a certain vein of thrift

runs through this apparent prodigality. Nature is never in a hurry, and seems to have had always before her eyes the adage, "Keep a thing long enough, and you will find a use for it." She has kept her beds of coal many millions of years without being able to find much use for them; she has sent them down beneath the sea, and the seabeasts could make nothing of them; she has raised them up into dry land, and laid the black veins bare, and still, for ages and ages, there was no living thing on the face of the earth that could see any sort of value in them; and it was only the other day, so to speak, that she turned a new creature out of her workshop, who by degrees acquired sufficient wits to make a fire, and then to discover that the black rock would burn.

I suppose that nineteen hundred years ago, when Julius Cæsar was good enough to deal with Britain as we have dealt with New Zealand, the primæval Briton, blue with cold and woad, may have known that the strange black stone, of which he found lumps here and there in his wanderings, would burn, and so help to warm his body and cook his food. Saxon, Dane, and Norman, swarmed into the land. The English people grew into a powerful nation, and Nature still waited for a full return for the capital she had invested in the ancient club-mosses. The eighteenth century arrived, and with it James Watt. The brain of that man was the spore out of which was developed the steam engine, and all the prodigious trees and branches of modern industry which have grown out of this. But coal is as much an essential condition of this growth and development as carbonic acid is for that of a club-moss. Wanting coal, we could not have smelted the iron needed to make our engines, nor have worked our engines when we had got them. But take away the engines, and the great towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire vanish like a dream. Manufactures give place to agriculture and pasture, and not ten men can live where now ten thousand are amply supported.

Thus, all this abundant wealth of money and of vivid life is Nature's interest upon her investment in club-mosses, and the like, so long ago. But what becomes of the coal which is burnt in yielding this interest? Heat comes out of it, light comes out of it, and if we could gather together all that goes up the chimney, and all that remains in the grate of a thoroughly-burnt coal-fire, we should find ourselves in possession of a quantity of carbonic acid, water, ammonia, and mineral matters, exactly equal in weight to the coal. But these are the very matters with which Nature supplied the club-mosses which made the coal. She is paid back principal and interest at the same time; and she straightway invests the carbonic acid, the water, and the ammonia in new forms of life, feeding with them the plants that now live. Thrifty Nature! Surely no prodigal, but most notable of housekeepers! THOMAS H. HUXLEY.

MR. GLADSTONE IN TRANSITION.

MR.

R. GLADSTONE'S famous " Chapter of Autobiography" had a very remarkable blank, and one which it is quite possible to supply. The leading object of that striking contribution to literature was to relieve the disestablishment proposed by the Liberal party "from the odium of baseness, and the lighter reproach of precipitancy," on the part of its leader. It started from the admission, "Ille ego qui quondam: I, the person who have now accepted a foremost share of the responsibility of endeavouring to put an end to the existence of the Irish Church as an Establishment, am also the person who of all men in official, perhaps in public life, did, until the year 1841, recommend, upon the highest and most imperious grounds, its resolute maintenance." The change was admittedthe change of opinion, and the consequent change of action. And while it was pointed out that in a peculiarly progressive stage of a nation's history, change of opinion must be looked for to a considerable extent on the part even of its leaders, Mr. Gladstone refused to accept this general consideration as a sufficient answer to the difficulty caused by the "great and glaring" revolution in his own course. “In theory at least, and for others, I am a purist with respect to what touches the consistency of statesmen." Change of opinion in its leaders is an evil to the country, though a much less evil than persistence in error. It is not perhaps always to be

condemned. But it is always to be watched and criticized, and there are abundant signs by which to distinguish between honest and earnest change on the one hand, and manœuvres on the other, which destroy confidence and entail dishonour. "Changes which are sudden and precipitate changes accompanied with a light and contemptuous repudiation of the former self-changes which are systematically timed and tuned to the interest of personal advancement-changes which are hooded, slurred over, or denied"-all defence of these he repudiated, while he set himself to show, with regard to his own conversion, that it was open and candid, as well as earnest and deliberate.

In this personal defence, however, Mr. Gladstone confined himself almost wholly to one line of argument. He pointed out that the doctrine of "The State in its Relations to the Church," originally published in 1838, and a fourth edition of which, greatly enlarged, appeared in 1841, was not a general defence of Establishments, but a defence of them on a specific ground. The Church, that volume argued, is only to be maintained for its truth-truth, of all possessions the most precious to the soul of man; and on this principle alone can its establishment be properly and permanently upheld. As Mr. Gladstone put it in a speech on the Appropriation Bill in 1836, a Church establishment is maintained for the sake of its doctrines, not of its members—they have no right whatever to an advantage over other subjects of the State. This was his position, but scarcely had his book issued from the press, when he found that there was no party, and probably no individual, in the House of Commons who was prepared to act upon it. He was "the last man on a sinking ship," and he resolved to go down with it. In the course of the year 1844 he became a member of the Cabinet of Sir Robert Peel, and as President of the Board of Trade was at the centre of the most interesting operations of that Government. Just then his chief made known to him his opinion that it was desirable to remodel and increase the grant to Maynooth. Now this question of Maynooth Mr. Gladstone had always treated as a testing question for the foundations of the Irish Established Church, and the proposal was absolutely inconsistent with the grounds on which he had advocated that establishment. It does not appear, indeed, that now, in 1844, he had the clear opinion on these practical questions which he had entertained a few years before. On the contrary, "I never entertained the idea of opposing the measure of Sir Robert Peel;" and he declined overtures made to him by those who actively resisted that measure. The sole object of his resigning his place in Sir Robert Peel's Cabinet when this scheme was brought forward was "with a great price" to obtain freedom; as he expressed it at the time in Parliament, "to

place myself, so far as in me lay, in a position to form, not only an honest, but likewise an independent and an unsuspected, judgment on the matter. And on this resignation his whole apology is founded: "I respectfully submit that by this act my freedom was established; and that it has never since, during a period of nearly five-andtwenty years, been compromised."

But if, during the succeeding twenty-five years, the freedom so acquired was not compromised, it would appear from the " Chapter of Autobiography" that it was also little used. The notes of warning which Mr. Gladstone founds on as given from time to time during that long period were not very loud, nor very clear, and they were exceedingly few. He privately asserted his freedom on the question at the epoch of the formation of Lord John Russell's Government in 1846. He declined to give a pledge to his Oxford Committee, in 1847, that he would stand by the Irish Church; but we may be certain that his Oxford Committee did not publish that fact. When speaking on the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, in 1851, he said that "we cannot change the profound and resistless tendencies of the age towards religious liberty." But the years flowed on, and, so far as the Autobiography records, nothing fuller or more distinct was publicly uttered; and during all this time when motions of inquiry into the Irish Church were made in Parliament, "when I voted, I voted against them," on the ground, as is explained, that they were partial and unsatisfactory. He told Sir Roundell Palmer, in 1863, that he had made up his mind the Irish Establishment should go; but this was a dead secret between the two illustrious friends. The sole occasion on which, as would seem from the Autobiography, anything was publicly said was so late as 1865, when in a speech in Parliament Mr. Gladstone declared that present action was impossible, that at any period immense difficulties would have to be encountered, but that this was "the question of the future." This speech was immediately attacked by Mr. Whiteside as hostile to the Irish Establishment, and Mr. Gladstone was obliged to write a letter to the Warden of Trinity College, in Scotland, stating that he considered the practical question as remote, and apparently out of all bearing on the politics of the day. And so the matter rested till the hour struck, and in 1867 the successor of Lord Palmerston, in the full but deeper allegiance of the Liberals, pronounced, amid the enthusiastic cheers of his suddenly consolidated party, that the time had at last come when the Irish Church should cease to exist as an establishment.

Clearly, this is not quite satisfactory. The Autobiography gives, in the first place, no sketch of the progress of the writer's own mind on the question. The great sacrifice of place in 1845, and those few and slight indications that, thereafter, he held himself free, which