be ashamed and afraid of matter. We are, at any rate, growing less and less proud of supernaturalisms-supernaturalisms which arose in the babyhood of peoples, and survive only because they are instilled into the babyhood of individuals.

While students explore, and theologians mourn, the poets grow angry. The explorer, says one laureate, is "a fingering slave who peeps and botanises on his mother's grave." Knowledge, says another, is "some wild Pallas from the brain of demons." "Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers," is a phrase which greatly consoles the ignorant—who usually believe themselves to be wise. It is true much knowledge may be got together where there is, it may be, little wisdom; but surely there can be no wisdom without knowledge. Wisdom comes when effective nerve gathers knowledge, winnows it, blows away the chaff, and uses well the grain. knowledge are both essential.

Nerve and And genius

too-is it not the finest nerve seeing knowledge which commoner nerve cannot see, and dealing with it by finest methods?

The alarms of theology are needless, but

D

the charms of poetry, and the anger also if need be, we must and will have. Poetry, the first of the arts, is a physiological art: passionate nerve clothes the product of intellectual nerve with passion. Hence poetry is the art of making truth more keenly true, and alas, falsehood more keenly false.

The future too, no matter how scientific it may be, will assuredly have its poets. And, fuller knowledge being revealed to them, they will be juster in thought, deeper in feeling, loftier in purpose. The mountain peak will not move them the less because they will be able to trace it back, through unknown time, to minute life underneath the ocean. A Danish forest will not the less confide to them its solemn secrets because they see, buried under it, fossil forests and, deeper still, the handiwork of early men. For them human nature will not be the less exalted because they discover that thought and feeling are born in mysterious nervo homes, and travel to and fro along strange nerve pathways. The poetry of the present will not come home to them the less because they can also decipher the volumes of extinct poetries.

One thing at least grows clearer and clearer : the onward movement of mankind will neither be checked, nor jostled out of its groove, nor turned at an angle. Our race, in its progress, may be said to be cutting its way through a dense forest. Many voices are heard in the gloom. The theologian-say Cardinal Newman, with clear and majestic voice calls upon us to return to the old paths: that cannot be. writer-say Thomas Carlyle, with startling gesture and vehement speech bids us be stirring; he does not tell us how to stir or whither. The student of science-say Charles Darwin, puts a lamp to our feet, shows us where we are, how we came, and how, all helping and all needing help, we may best go on our way.

The

ORIGIN AND NATURE OF THE INQUIRY.

CHAPTER II.

SEVERAL years ago I noticed that the women who came into our hospitals suffering from injuries inflicted by their husbands, had as a rule something peculiar in their personal appearance. The peculiarity or peculiarities seemed common to all of them. They differed in some mysterious way from the women who were admitted for purely accidental injuries. They certainly had not been assaulted' because they were old or plain. It is one of the dangers of unbelief, so we are constantly told, that infidels will put aside wives who have lost their youth and youthful looks. Many of these women were young; some were very pretty; their husbands were all believers.

I came to see, slowly and by degrees, that the skin of the assaulted women was thin ; it had, as a rule, little pigment, and was often brightly and delicately pink. Their hairgrowth was notably spare; their eyebrows were scanty or almost absent; the hair on their

heads was short and thinly scattered.

They

tended, many of them, to be stout. In their figures or skeletons also they were unlike their hospital companions. They seemed to stoop, some little, others much. Their backs were inclined to be round, being more or less convex from shoulder to shoulder, and from neck to waist. They carried their heads and shoulders a little forwards. In all these matters they were unlike the occupants of the neighbouring beds, many of whom had abundant eyebrows and copious hair-growth generally. Very curiously when the hair-growth was rich I found a different figure or skeleton; the spine was straight, the head easily and naturally upright, the shoulders poised backwards, and the back itself was flat or even slightly hollow or concave transversely between the shoulders. The skin too was more freely pigmented. The women with straight spines, flat backs, richer hair-growth, and darker skins, tended to be thin, but were not at all invariably so. In appearance a few were handsome, some were comely, not a small number were more or less plain.

The friends and neighbours often let it be