sistent that the unthinking masses have been sadly deluded. But our university alone has had the courage to lay its young bat vigorous hand upon the mane of untamed speculation and say: 'We will have no more of this. Science we want, no crude, undigested theories for the sons of our patrons. Science we must have, science we intend to have, but we want only science clearly demonstrated, and we have great cause to rejoice in this step, for it deals a blow the force of which scientific atheism will find it exceedingly difficult to break.' "
If any one doubts that there is a crying need of the elementary schoolmaster in Tennessee, the literary quality of this official utterance in behalf of a great university will probably be sufficient to settle the matter. But the passage has a more serious aspect. In the announcement for 1878-'79, the first purpose of Vanderbilt University is stated to be the "protection of the morals" of youth during the period of their pupilage. We respectfully suggest that this protection is equally needed for the clergymen of the Tennessee Conference, who seem to have not even a rudimentary conception of the immorality of falsehood and slander. Dr. Winchell, an eminent geologist and scientific scholar, and also a man of known religious character, who had freely published his views and had been but recently chosen as a member of the faculty of the institution, was displaced from his position because the authorities did not agree with all his views; and the Methodist Conference of the State "rejoices" and expresses its "intense gratification" at this blow dealt at "scientific atheism." Dr. Winchell is thus branded with a false and libelous charge by a body of religious teachers which pretends to commend the university as a protector of morals! It is bad enough for the institution to have to stand the consequences of its bigotry and intolerance in this age of growing liberalization, but it might well have been spared this official defense of the denomination to which it belongs.
HUXLEY ON THE RIGHTS OF AUTHORS.
The unsettled state of copyright legislation and the progress of communistic ideas in relation to literary property give interest to all intelligent discussion of the nature and extent of literary rights. We last month gave the evidence of Prof. Tyndall before the English copyright commission on this subject, and we now follow it by that of Prof. Huxley to the same purpose. The commission had various practical things before it, but it gave thorough attention to the fundamental question of the basis of property in published works, and in this Americans are quite as much interested as the English.
The testimony furnished to our readers was elicited by a systematic attempt so to undermine the rights of authors to their books as substantially to break them down. Several able men connected with the copyright commission, either as members of it or as witnesses before it, took the ground that literary property is not like other property, and differs from it in such a manner that Government may interfere to regulate it in a way that amounts to the subversion of it. They say that, as long as an author keeps his book to himself, he owns it; but when he publishes it he parts with it, he surrenders it, and the public then become its owner, and Government may properly appoint an agent to take charge of it and do with it as the authorities please. Unwilling to push the doctrine to the logical extreme of barefaced, downright communism, by stripping the author clean of his property, these parties maintained that government should merely enter into its possession and manage it for him, allowing him such fraction of the profits as it pleased. In lieu of the existing copyright, by which an author makes such a bargain with the publisher as suits both parties, they proposed what is called a "royalty" system, by which anybody who pleases
