are not sure that it would not have been better for him to marry Catherine. The young Norman is very charming, but her temper might get a little troublesome, especially if the Eaton Square people snubbed her, as no doubt they would endeavour to do. One feels there is a certain cruelty in adding the one word of criticism which rises to our lips in reference to so soft and sweet a creature as this same little Catherine. Nothing has ever been more daintily, more delicately done than the revelation of her feelings when she was the kindly-treated yet solitary governess among all those cheerful Butlers. In this and in 'Elizabeth,' and in those charming little fairy tales which we believe we owe to the same pen, the wistful little maiden in the shade, with her modest longings for happiness, her pensive consciousness of being alone, her surprised, sad, unenvying sense of contrast when everything bright goes to the other, and all that is dim and darksome comes to herself, is set forth with a grace and tender feeling which we would be brutes not to appreciate. The strain is exquisite, but it is a monotone. No doubt there are pangs of pain in the young creature's lot which are as keen as anything which ever befalls the heart; but still we all know that the time might come when even Catherine should look back and sigh for the days quand j'etais jeune et souffrais tant. The story of those youthful troubles is very sweet, but there are other troubles in the world, and other kinds of experience worth the study. We do not blame-we only suggest. The author of the 'Village on the Cliff' has too much real power to confine herself to one string. The harp has many strings, and there is music in them all.

We had hoped to have found room in this paper for some words of comment upon the works of Mr Charles Reade, who has gradually

become one of the greatest artists in the realm of fiction; but we have already exceeded reasonable limits, and we will not do that powerful romancist so much wrong as to bring him in at the end. His power is of the kind which will always seem coarse to a certain class of minds unable to discriminate; for he is very apt to call a spade a spade; and among the minikin performances of the day, his strong and genuine mastery over human characters and passions shows out with a force of outline which may possibly, in some cases, look exaggerated. We will, if the fates are propitious, return on another occasion to the works of a writer to whom we are disposed to assign one of the highest places in his art.

And we cannot but add, by way of conclusion to our sermon, that though we have much to lament, we have something too to congrat ulate ourselves upon in the present condition of English fiction. The objectionable writers are all secondrate; genius there is none among them, and not much even of anything that can be called real talent. It is to be supposed they must be entertaining to somebody, else they would not be popular; but then we are all aware that there are a great many foolish people in the world-people, happily, too foolish to be really injured by any rubbish they may read; and all that is best and highest in fiction, honourably maintains that character for purity which has been won by the English school of novels. This ought to be a consolation to everybody concerned; and, in the mean time, we can but trust that the tide may turn-that even foolish and vulgar readers may get tired of foolish books, and that the respectable name of Mr Mudie may no longer be made the means of introducing nasty sentiments and equivocal heroines to English novel-readers far and wide.

IT has been a favourite speculation of philosophers that the physical phenomena of the world are all reducible to matter and motion. By matter is understood that which is extended and impenetrable, of which the atom is conceived as the minimum or unit. Atoms defined as extended and impenetrable, and these in movements of infinite variety, running sometimes together in close juxtaposition, or circling round each other-moving, in short, in every direction and combination, and with every degree of velocity-these two conceptions, it is said, are literally all we can think, when (liberating ourselves from the charm of words, or the tyranny of metaphors drawn from the human will or human passions) we strive to form for ourselves an intelligible idea of the material universe. Amongst modern philosophers Des Cartes has the credit of first stating this doctrine in all its absoluteness. Our Locke threw out similar views; and indeed we may say that since his time all speculative men of a certain positive or analytic cast of thought, and who are averse to the occult and the mysterious, have looked with favour on this broad generalisation, though they may not have seen their way to its establishment.

For it is one thing to seize upon a conception from a metaphysical point of view-on the broad ground, say, that it is the only intelligible conception open to us-and quite another to apply this conception, as the man of science imperatively demands that it should be applied, to all the actual facts of nature. It so happened that, subsequent to Des Cartes, the very progress of science was such as to lead the

mind away from his great generalisation. The chemists, by their successful analyses, were able to hold up to the world a certain number of elementary substances, which they represented as being endowed with special propertiesthus striking at the fundamental conception of the unity or identity of all matter. Where their analysis stopped, there they saw an element or distinct kind of matter. The metals shone conspicuously amongst the simple bodies of the universe, holding a specific character of their own. Having established the fact, as it seemed to them, of matter of different kinds, and having familiarised their imagination with the idea of matter in the invisible form of gas, it was almost an unavoidable consequence that when the chemists wanted to explain the phenomena of heat or electricity they should, in each case, invent a subtle matter which should be distinguished from other matter by the requisite properties. Heat was some element diffused through bodies, lying latent at one time, and seen in energetic action at another. Light had been long, and very naturally, considered as some peculiar emanation from the sun. The phenomenon of electricity demanded a separate fluid, or perhaps two fluids. In face of all these elementary substances, endowed with their especial properties, how was it possible to uphold the doctrine of one matter, definable only as having form, resistance, and motion?

The greatest discovery or grandest generalisation of modern science (the laws of gravity as determined by Newton) offered, perhaps, a severer opposition to the Cartesian theory of the universe than even

the discoveries of the chemist. Newton himself, when he spoke of the attraction of matter towards matter, was at first solicitous to add that he meant nothing more by the word than to describe the fact that bodies tended towards each other according to the law he had enunciated. But the word attraction, by which the fact was naturally expressed, came to be considered (perhaps, after a time, even in the mind of Newton himself) as synonymous with a peculiar force. Matter was endowed with this new force of attraction. How to reconcile this new force with that inertia which was still considered as part of the definition of matter, was felt to be a perplexity; nevertheless the new property very soon established itself in physical science. And as faith and familiarity are much the same thing in the region of ideas, it came to be considered as a settled truth that matter had this attractive force. Gravity was the attraction of bodies towards each other; cohesion was an attraction of particles; chemical affinity was some curious special attraction of one kind of matter for another kind of matter.

But science, which was leading us away from our Cartesian generalisation, has lately, in its still further progress, been leading us back to it. Chemistry, which had been giving us definite elementary substances, distinguished by their original properties, suddenly startled the world by the announcement that certain of its elementary substances were capable (without union with any other substance) of assuming different states, in which they manifested different properties. To what could these different properties be due but some different disposition of the particles of this simple elementary substance? What we call, then, the special property of this or that substance may be nothing but the special arrangement of the particles of one common matter. But the

modern doctrine which resolved heat into a mode of motion gave a still further impetus to speculation of this kind. Heat had been regarded as some peculiar force of some peculiar matter. It was now regarded as the motion, either of the matter before us, or of that ether which the science of optics had already compelled us to imagine as permeating all space. Nor must we forget to mention that other announcement-first made, we believe, with distinctness and with full appreciation of its importance, by Mr Grove in his admirable Essay on the Correlation of Forces'-that there was a certain transformation, as it appeared, of heat into light and electricity, and of electricity into light and heat; that, in fact, all these phenomena were interchangeable. What could be thus transmuted except one motion into another motion? Or what could we deduce but that all these phenomena were but successive movements of some matter common to them all?

Thus was science bringing us back to the great generalisation that all physical phenomena are but the varied movements of one universal matter. But now when we speak of the motions of innumerable atoms, we must, of course, suppose some laws of communication of movement from atom to atom. Atoms are, by the terms of their definition, impenetrable, and this impenetrability implies that they interfere with each other's movements. How do they behave towards each other? There is no fact with which we are more familiar than this, that one moving body striking another, sets the second body in motion. This, which we call impulse or momentum, is a fact open to the senses. Is there any other method of communicating motion? Or need we devise any other method? What is to be said of this attraction? Do bodies really impress movement upon each other by some attractive

power which acts at a distance? Since the phenomena of heat and light have compelled us to introduce an invisible ether penetrating through all space, may not the action of this ether on bodies, in the old way of impact or momentum, account for all the phenomena of gravity? There have not been wanting, both in England and France, men of science who have taken this view of the subject. Mr Grove, in his late excellent address as President of the British Association, hints at such a solution of the difficulty.

In the charming little treatise, 'La Physique Moderne,' which we have put at the head of our paper, M. Emile Saigey gives a very lucid account of this latest mode of speculating on the physical facts of the universe. It is a mode which may be described as bringing all the resources of modern science to the elucidation of the old text of Des Cartes, and other philosophers who have persisted that the human mind is incapable of any intelligible conception of physical facts which does not resolve itself into matter and motion,-into the laws of the distribution and combination of moving atoms. There is, in fact, under many names, but one science, and that science is mechanics. Atoms, and the laws which regulate the direction and velocity of their movements-this is all our material universe.

There is one objection, drawn from mechanical science itself, which M. Saigey thinks it necessary to notice, and remove, at the very commencement. Matter, in its simplest state, is represented as a multitude of individual atoms, striking and rebounding from each other in every possible direction. How do they rebound? Are they elastic? But elasticity belongs to a compound body; it is some play of the molecules or atoms of which it is organised; it is a mechanism which implies that there are void spaces within the elastic body. The

researches of M. Poinsot on revolving bodies have, we are assured, relieved us from the difficulty. These have shown that a hard but nonelastic body will, if revolving, rebound from its obstacle exactly as if it were elastic; it will even, sometimes, after a rebound have an increased velocity, because the movement of rotation has, in part, been changed into one of translation. The billiard-player is familiar with the effect which the rotation of the ball has in modifying the rebound. In this example a high degree of elasticity combines with the rotation; but if in our thoughts we separate the effects of the rotation, we shall be able to understand how the ethereal atoms may rebound from each other without being elastic. We have but to confer on them, at once, as an original property, a rotatory movement, as well as one of translation, and our difficulty is at an end.

We propose to present our readers with a rapid outline of M. Saigey's theory. We prefer to take here the humble office of the interpreter of other men's views. We must not be understood as following implicitly our author. Indeed, on one subject-the nature of force, and of our idea of force-we do not find M. Saigey quite consistent with himself. Nothing could be more clear than the statement which he makes upon this subject at the commencement of his essay, but he does not at all times adhere to this statement.

It was a great step which science made when it determined that nothing was destroyed in the world; that the quantity of matter remained constant; that nothing passed before us but change of form. The chemist could disperse the solid body so that nothing remained to affect the senses; and he could call it back from its impalpable and invisible condition, and weigh it again before us. He established as a fact what had only been a speculation. Science has now undertaken to demonstrate the truth

of another and kindred speculation -that the amount of movement is constant in the world; that all the activities of matter resolve themselves into change of direction and velocity of individual movements. Movement itself, like matter, is never destroyed, and its acceleration here is always accompanied by its retardation there. The sum of the movements in the physical creation is always the same.

If it can be established that the only cause of any known movement is some previously moving body, which loses its own motion in the same proportion that it communicates motion to the body it strikes, it must follow that there can be neither increase nor diminution in the whole amount of motions in the universe. It is, perhaps, superfluous to add that, in making this statement, we suggest no limits to Creative Power, either in the amount of matter or motion that may enter into the universe. The origin of motion itself is, like the origin of matter itself, a question of theology, not of science. The laws of the Created are what science aspires to comprehend. If it be a truth that every known motion is traceable to a previous motion which ceased when the new one was produced, our thesis is demonstrated. It becomes, therefore, a question of great interest whether we are to admit of other causes of motion-as, for instance, this occult and mysterious force of attraction.

According to the theory we have to expound, the word force should be understood as synonymous with what the mechanician means by momentum. It simply expresses the fact that one moving body, or par

ticle of matter, moves another by impinging on it. As employed to express any other cause of motion, our theory requires that it should be expelled from the vocabulary of science.

Under these circumstances, what is it we are to understand by the inertia of matter, or are we still to use that expression? We are instructed here to embrace motion in our very definition of matter. What, indeed, is impenetrability itself, which is said to be our fundamental idea of matter, but a relation between two moving bodies?—this relation, namely, that one cannot move through the other. There may be an occult or transcendent cause for impenetrability, as there may be a transcendent cause for motion, which the mind cannot follow; but impenetrability, as known to us, stands in relation to motion. In order that matter should have the property of impenetrability, it must also have the property of motion. So far, therefore, as we can give any definition of matter at all, motion must enter into the definition.* Are we now to say that matter is inert, because every movement it takes upon itself is received from some other portion of matter, and retained till it finds some other portion of matter on which to bestow it? Or are we to say that matter is active, and has force, because it can thus bestow its motion? It seems to be inert or passive when it receives, and to be active when it gives, motion. And yet, on second consideration, the body that receives motion is the one that starts forward to move, and may surely be said to be as active as the body that impinged on it, and lost thereby a