all in a very natural way. But it has been objected to on account of the amount of subsidence in the floor of the Pacific and Indian Oceans which it would imply, and for other reasons. Mr. Murray attempts to find a foundation at a suitable depth for the corals to begin work upon without supposing subsidence. He thinks this could be furnished by the accumulation of skeletons of minute animals and plants, upon natural elevations of the sea-floor, although when such remains fall to greater depths they are mostly dissolved by the aid of the carbon dioxide in the water. He thinks that a coral plantation rising on such a base would tend to assume the atoll form owing to the more abundant supply of food to the outer portions, and the removal of dead coral rock from the inner portions by the force of currents and by solution. He believes that barrier reefs have been built out from the shore, and that the channel within them is hollowed out by the same agencies as the lagoon of an atoll. The death of Darwin occurred so soon after the promulgation of this theory that he did not have an opportunity to publish any examination of it, but to a friend, Mr. T. Mellard Reade, who had expressed the opinion in a letter that it was "a very far-fetched idea," he replied: "I am not a fair judge, but I agree with you exactly that Murray's view is far-fetched. It is astonishing that there should be rapid dissolution of carbonate of lime at great depths and near the surface, but not at intermediate depths where he places his mountain-peaks." Besides a statement of Murray's theory, Prof. Bonney's appendix contains abstracts of the views of Alexander Agassiz, H. B. Guppy, G. C. Bourne, Bayley Balfour, W. O. Crosby, and J. D. Dana, together with an expression of his own opinion as to the value of the various objections to Darwin's theory. The volume contains three folded charts, and has an adequate index. It is bound uniformly with the other works of Darwin issued by the same publishers.
Natural Religion. By F. Max Müller London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 608. Price, $5.
This book includes the first course of Gifford lectures, twenty in number, delivered by Prof. Müller before the University of Glasgow in 1888. The Gifford lectures rest upon a fund of eighty thousand pounds which was left by Lord Adam Gifford by will in 1885, to be applied in specific sums to the establishment in four Scotch universities of chairs for "Promoting, advancing, teaching, and diffusing the study of Natural Theology," or "the knowledge of God, the Infinite, the All, the first and only cause, . . . the knowledge of his nature and attributes, the knowledge of the relations which men and the whole universe bear to him, the knowledge of the nature and foundation of ethics or morals, and of all obligations and duties thence arising." The will provided for changes of lecturers at short intervals, so that the subject might be presented by different minds; that no tests should be required of them save that they be "able, reverent men, true thinkers, sincere lovers of and earnest inquirers after truth"; and that they should treat their subject as a strictly natural science, and under no restraint. Prof. Müller's course naturally assumes the character of an introduction to the courses that are to follow. Much of it is therefore given to laying down the lines and adjusting the bearings; and the discussions comprised in it touch chiefly upon the three points of the definition of natural religion; the proper method of its treatment; and the materials available for its study. The definition is found in the seventh lecture to be, "Religion consists in the perception of the infinite under such manifestations as are able to influence the moral character of man." Of methods, the historical is preferred as the one most likely to lead to results of permanent value. Its object is to connect the present with the past, to interpret the present by the past, and to discover, if possible, the solution of our present difficulties, by tracing them back to the causes from which they arose. It has to be, and is, defended against the common misapprehension that the historian cares only about facts, without attempting to interpret them; and against the opposite school of philosophers who think that our own inner consciousness is the one and only source from which to draw a knowledge and understanding of natural religion—forgetting that their inner consciousness "is but the surface of the human intellect, resting on stratum upon stratum of an-
