may hereafter be discovered, when few are now known to favor the new hypothesis.  We can see no more reason why a giraffe should have had a long neck, because he wished to crop the leaves of tall trees, than that mankind should have become winged, because in all times both children and men have wished to fly.  Nor do we think Mr. Wallace’s opinion any better founded, that, owing to a dearth of leaves on the lower branches of trees, all the short-necked giraffes died out, and left the long-necked ones to continue the species.  This theory reminds us of the “astronomical expirimint” proposed by Father Tom to his “Howliness” the Pope, of the goose and the turkey-cock picking the stars from the sky.  As to the ape-like skull of Engis Cave, and the human skeleton found near Dusseldorf in a cavern, we think it would not be difficult to find full as bad skulls on living shoulders, and equally bad forms in skeletons now walking about.  To us they are no evidence that the first man was a gorilla or a chimpanzee, nor does his or Darwin’s argument convince us that all vertebrates were once fishes.  This question, however, is still mooted; and we have no objections that people should amuse themselves in thus tracing back their ancestry.

To this class of inquirers Sir Charles Lyell’s book will furnish food for reflection; and they will see that even so enthusiastic a writer as this new convert to the Darwinian doctrine can furnish but very slender support to it from his geologic lore.

There is much interesting matter in the book besides the generalizations we object to, and enough to render it welcome to the library of any one interested in the study of Geology and of the antiquity of the animal creation.

Spurgeon’s Sermons. Preached and revised by the Rev. C.H.  SPURGEON.  Seventh Series.  New York:  Sheldon and Co.

Spurgeon is emphatically of the earth, earthy.  This we say, not as anything against him intellectually or spiritually, but simply as indicating the material ballast, which in this man is grosser and heavier than in most men, pulling forever against his sails, and absolutely forbidding that freer movement of the imagination which usually belongs to minds of a power equal in degree to his.  Not that this freedom flows necessarily out of a great degree of mental power, or by any organic law is associated with what we term genius.  Every one would admit that Luther was a man of genius; yet Luther was in this respect no better off than Spurgeon,—­he was as totally destitute of wings, of the possibility of aerial flight.  His power we consider to be far higher than that of Spurgeon; but this we argue from the fact, that, although equally with Spurgeon he was excluded from the sovereignty of the air, although he was equally denied both the faculty to create and the capacity to receive subtile speculation, he had what Spurgeon has not, an almighty, irresistible impetus in his movements,—­movements