Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/715

reach of human reason, and because the alleged revelations from God upon them are the most scanty and uncertain. The creeds of the future will begin-where the old or ended: upon the nature of man, his condition on earth, his social duties and civil obligations, the development of his reason, I spiritual nature, its range, possibilities, education—the doctrine of the human reason, of the emotions, of the will—man as an individual. man social and collective; and, from a sound knowledge of the nature of the mind, developed within the scope of our experience; and observation, we shall deduce conceptions of the great mind—the God idealized from our best ascertainments—in the sphere within which our faculties were created to act with certainty of knowledge. Our creeds will ascend from the known to the unknown, which is the true law and method of acquiring knowledge. Hitherto they have expended their chief force upon that which is but dimly known.

 

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THE DARWIN MEMORIAL.

A movement has been started in England to get up some kind of a memorial in honor of Mr. Charles Darwin. The English Executive Committee has requested the following American gentlemen to co-operate with them in promoting the object: Asa Gray, chairman; Spencer F. Baird, James D. Dana, Charles W. Eliot, D. C. Gilman, James Hall, Joseph Le Conte, Joseph Leidy. O. C. Marsh, S. Weir Mitchell, Simon Newcomb, Charles Eliot Norton, Francis A. Walker. Theodore D. Woolsey; Alexander Agassiz, Treasurer. Subscriptions may be sent to Alexander Agassiz, Cambridge, Massachusetts, who will acknowledge the same and forward them to the Treasurer of the English Executive Committee of the Darwin Memorial.

The American committee, in their circular, without date, say that the form which the memorial is to take has not yet been decided; it will probably include an endowment for a scholarship to carry on biological research. Nothing could be more appropriate to the character of the man whose memory is to be honored than thus to link his name with the progress of knowledge in the field which he has done so much to make his own. But the "Athenæum" announces that the memorial will take the customary form of a marble statue, and that the trustees of the British Museum will be asked to place it in the large hall of the museum South Kensington. The English subscriptions are reported as amounting to $12,500. The United Kingdom will probably be able without help to pay for a marble statue; and would it not be well for the American committee to entertain the idea of doing something independently in this country? The endowment for a biological scholarship, if abandoned in England, might well be taken up here.

 

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LITERARY NOTICES.

A Geographical Reader. Compiled and arranged by James Johonnot, author of "Country School-Houses" New York: D. Appleton & Co. Pp. 416. P: 1.25.

The compiler believes: is no advantage for the reading lessons given to the pupil in school to be primarily directed to some subject of thought. "If the food is also palatable as well as nutritious," the pupil becomes interested and his mind engaged with the substance of the lesson, and he will gain all the advantages that otherwise cost so much labor, without direct and conscious effort. The reading exercises should also be bed to the condition of the pupil's mind at each period of growth, and should constitute appropriate models of style, leading in the direction of literary excellence. Hence is suggested the propriety of introducing lessons bearing on some topic of study which the pupil is pursuing at the same time. Text-books rive, necessarily, the bare outlines. The reading-books might help to fill up the outlines with details, giving fuller descriptions of the most interesting features, and the stories which the children love so web. When these supplementary elements are chosen from co-authors, we have what we might call an