ity of the thing indicated. He knows that the policy of restriction imposed by the State upon the freedom of commercial interchange, by which monopolists are enriched, the people plundered, the Government corrupted, and the country disgraced, is intrenched in popular misconception, because it has got itself labeled "protection." The case before us is equally in point. So long as the term "social science" is employed to characterize the heterogeneous and discordant opinions of unscientific men upon the most intricate and refractory problems of civilized life, it will be discredited in its true application.
The American Social Science Association has been running for ten years, and its British prototype has had a conspicuous.career for twice that time, but so little have they done toward the real promotion of the subject, so little to prepare the public for it, and so much to disseminate erroneous views respecting it, that the most comprehensive and solid contribution yet made to sociological science—a work entirely free from speculation, and which aims to lay the foundation of the science by collating and arranging the elemental facts descriptive of all types of social structure—cannot get patronage enough even to pay for carrying on the publication; and the real difficulty is the false impressions of the subject that have been fostered and disseminated by those who have acquired weight with the publie as its promoters.
CORRECTED AGAIN.
The ex-President of Harvard College, writing in the Unitarian Review, revives the perversion of Prof. Tyndall's views on the prayer question in the following pointed words: "Let the President of the British Association refrain from insulting Protestant Christians by proposing an arithmetical test of the reality of the communion of the soul with God." We are curious to know where Dr. Hill got his evidence for the charge that Prof. Tyndall has ever proposed "an arithmetical test of the reality of the communion of the soul with God," or any evidence that he has ever questioned that reality. To the conception of prayer as inspiration, communion with the Divine Spirit, or the expression of devotional feeling, we are not aware that Prof. Tyndall has ever made the slightest objection. On the contrary, we know, by his own repeated avowals, that he recognizes the religious efficacy of prayer as a "strengthener of the heart," which "in its purer forms hints at disciplines which few of us can neglect without moral loss." Again, he observes: "It is not my habit to think otherwise than solemnly of the feeling that prompts prayer." This, surely, is very far from being the language either of denial or of insult.
As to the so-called prayer-test, it was not to try "the reality of the communion of the soul with God" that Sir Henry Thompson proposed it, and Prof. Tyndall indorsed it by sending the anonymous article to the Contemporary Review. The object was, indeed, very different from this. It was to determine the validity of what may be called the physical theory of prayer; to ascertain the value of petitions to God for intervention in producing designated physical effects, such as changing the weather, augmenting the crops, or staying disease in special answer to such petitions. It was to the conception of prayer as critical and advisory, as objecting to this and calling for that, as invoking a potency that is available to man for the attainment of specific ends in the natural world, such as can be only in this way secured, that it was proposed to apply some rational method of verification.
The effects claimed being physical, it is the legitimate work of science to search out and measure every agency by which they are influenced. Nor
