ing, Professor Naville's collection of the texts of the New Kingdom being by far the most substantial contribution to its study.

Dr Budge has recently published two large volumes on the Egyptian gods with the sub-title 'Studies in Egyptian Mythology.' The latter seems to promise an attempt to advance the subject for specialists. To Dr Budge, as keeper of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities in the British Museum, we should be justified in looking for original studies of great value, based on the great national collections placed in his charge. But his enormous range of acquirements, it must be confessed, seems to leave him satisfied with a very moderate though wide acquaintance with Egyptian; and, while works from his pen succeed each other with astonishing rapidity, they show little sign of the patience and reserve that are required to make them permanently useful. They may be very serviceable for the moment to the general public, and useful to scholars as rough indexes of material; but they will be cast aside the moment the same subject is dealt with in a more serious vein. We fear that the Gods of the Egyptians' is no exception.

These volumes are large and handsome, but the contents are very disappointing, considering the high position of the author. They are, doubtless, far beyond the powers of an ordinary compiler. A vast mass of information is accumulated round the subject of Egyptian religious conceptions and the names of the individual deities; but a glance at the translations, which Dr Budge has the courage to set alongside the original hieroglyphics, is enough to show how little confidence can be placed in the present work in detail. The publisher's circular drew attention to the coloured illustrations-about one hundred plates, each of which is printed in eleven colours.' Here was an opportunity for valuable contributions to science; and the high price of the book might well have been justified. But the illustrations are evidently only for the use of those who had no previous knowledge of typical forms of Egyptian deities. Some few are good, and are easily recognised as taken from the splendid papyrus of Any, the only fault to find with them being that they are somewhat hackneyed; others are from rough outlines in Lanzone's dictionary, hero decked to taste in a really

painful gaudiness of 'eleven colours'; others, we are informed in the preface, are copied from papyri and coffins in the British Museum. But in no individual case is the source or age of the picture stated; many are ugly in pose and un-Egyptian or strangely base in feature.

Notwithstanding all these disadvantages, English readers, probably even English scholars, will be glad to have this detailed account of the Egyptian deities, profusely illustrated as it is. There has not yet been published, even abroad, so full an account of the facts recorded in the pictures and the texts. Lanzone's 'Dizionario di Mitologia Egizia' was compiled before the religious writings of the Old Kingdom had been at all put under contribution; and the amount of material subsequently collected is prodigious. Dr Budge shows himself able to cope with a large part of the new texts in a summary way; and the critic can only wish that such remarkable talents and industry had produced work of greater precision. The full index will greatly facilitate reference to the book; but it is difficult to see what purpose is served by printing in the body of the text enormous lists of obscure divinities, named in the 'Book of the Dead' and similar sources, especially when no references are given to the passages where they occur in the original.

On considering the vast and rapidly growing bulk of material of every kind to be dealt with and digested, the main requirement of Egyptology, whether archæological or literary, seems now more than ever to be accuracy of observation and of interpretation, which also means distinguishing clearly between fact and conjecture. If leading scholars would bear this steadily in mind, we believe that their books would be either fewer or smaller, and that each contribution would mark a definite and positive step in the advance of knowledge. In this way -we submit the suggestion with all respect-science and the world at large would reap a double blessing.

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Art. IV.-EUROPEAN THOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century. By John Theodore Merz. Vols i and ii. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1896, 1903.

How often has that serene and lofty boast of the youthful Francis Bacon been quoted, that he had taken all knowledge to be his province'; and how often has the reflection been added, that no man in the present day could make such a boast, by reason of the continual enlargement of the contents of knowledge, the multiplication of its branches, and the growing intricacy of its principles. That there is some truth in such a reflection it is impossible to deny; for it will confer distinction on a man if he extends the bounds of even a single science by original fruitful insight. A few men of genius, of whom Thomas Young is in England the most remarkable example, have made important discoveries in two quite distinct sciences; but to enlarge all the many branches of knowledge is a sheer impossibility for an individual mind.

But there is a sense in which it is not now, and never will be, an impossibility for a man to take all knowledge for his province. The separate sciences, astronomy, botany, chemistry, and the like, are not wholly separate, even when they appear to be very remote from one another. Astronomy, linked with physics, announces to us the doctrine of the cooling of the earth after ages of incandescence, and thereby gives a historical startingpoint for geology; geology informs us of ancient animals and plants whose remains are embedded in the earth's strata, and thereby gives a historical starting-point for zoology and botany; zoology and botany conduct us, on the one hand, to the consideration of those wonderful historical changes in the forms of living beings, to which the name of evolution is generally applied, and, on the other hand, to the science of microscopic physiology, which tells us that the essence of corporeal life lies in the simple form of the living cell. Physiology in its turn is deeply implicated with organic chemistry, which tells us of the need of oxygen for the blood, and phosphates for

the bones, and iron to make the blades of grass and the leaves of trees green; and organic chemistry leads us to inorganic chemistry, with its far-reaching inferences as to atoms and molecules as the first elements of all material things. The atoms of matter are in incessant vibration; and this fact leads us immediately to those subtle vibrations of the illimitable ether, extending through all space, wherein lies the secret cause of the light which gladdens our eyes; the theory of light is closely connected with the more mysterious subjects of electricity and magnetism, and with the all-pervading influence of heat. Sound, again, is an instance of another kind of vibration, less subtle, physically speaking, scarcely less important for human happiness.

But geology again leads us, not only to the primæval animals, but to primæval man; and herein lies the beginning of a new kind of knowledge entirely; for primæval man is connected by distinct steps with those ancient civilisations which are the first type of the civilised life which we know; and thus there come before us, in regular gradation, governments and civilisations, arts and sciences, philosophies and ideals; whence it is that the whole world of matter and mind is revealed as a complex many-coloured texture, fading away into the mysteries of an unimaginable past, and into the glories of a far-off future. In all this great order there is no single part which does not stand related to all the other parts.

Now by reason of this cognate character of the various branches of human knowledge and thought it is possible for a single mind to obtain command of certain leading principles which run through the whole; and thus one man may legislate for universal knowledge, determine what is best in it, make clear the leading currents of it, and derive the subsidiary streams from the point where they flow forth for the satisfaction of some special human need. Philosophy is the name of the task so delineated; and philosophy can never die. But between the philosophy of one age and the philosophy of another age there will be natural differences, resulting not from the truth or error that there is in either, but from the needs of mankind in either age. Socrates judged rightly in his day that the conscience of man was the element

which of all others most needed bringing into clearness and sanity; but to say this is not to condemn Bacon, who, two thousand years later, poured out the wealth of his imagination in commending the common earth, our home and nursing-ground, as the most fruitful theme to which the human intellect could devote itself. Not only is philosophy subject to this blameless variation, but great discoverers in some single realm of science have occasionally a power akin to that of the philosopher; and Copernicus, Newton, and Darwin, in each case by a single theorem, effected great revolutions in the general tenor of men's thoughts.

But the progress of human knowledge has brought into existence another kind of inquirer, who, equally with the philosopher, takes all knowledge for his province, and who yet does not seek to guide thought as the philosopher does. This is the historian of thought, whose office it is to confirm the possession of mankind in the provinces which have been already won. The historian of thought is like the organiser of means of communication, the road-maker by whose efforts the transit from one branch of knowledge to another is rendered easier; the lessons learned in one province are transferred to another, the differences of soil and climate (if we may use such metaphors) are known, whereby true analogies may be noted and false analogies avoided.

Such an administrator and organiser of communications, such a roadmaker and assigner of landmarks in the provinces of thought is Dr Theodore Merz, whose two volumes on the History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century' are named at the head of this article; and he appears to us to be in one respect of rare excellence, in the thoroughness, namely, with which he goes to the roots of each successive branch of science, and (without any theorising on his own account) explains the ultimate point which has in each case been attained by the ablest inquirers; so that he presents his readers, not merely with the individual results of science, but with the keys to those results. He is much more than a recorder of successive scientific discoveries; he brings into the foreground that unity of conception which all great scientific discoverers have aimed at and partly attained; he exhibits the different sciences as having