sputes a heat and bitterness at
least as marked as that of their old enemies, the theologians. It was
said that Miss Martineau had begun to improve before she was mesmerised,
and what was still more to the point, that she had been taking heavy
doses of iodine. 'It is beyond all question or dispute,' as Voltaire
said, 'that magic words and ceremonies are quite capable of most
effectually destroying a whole flock of sheep, if the words be
accompanied by a sufficient quantity of arsenic.'

Mesmerism was indirectly the means of bringing Miss Martineau into an
intimate acquaintance with a gentleman, who soon began to exert a
decisive influence upon the most important of her opinions. Mr. Atkinson
is still alive, and we need not say much about him. He seems to have
been a grave and sincere person, using his mind with courageous
independence upon the great speculative problems which were not in 1844,
as they are in 1877, the common topics of every-day intercourse among
educated people. This is not the place for an examination of the
philosophy in which Miss Martineau was finally landed by Mr. Atkinson's
influence. That philosophy was given to the world in 1851, in a volume
called _Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development_. The
greater part of it was written by Mr. Atkinson in reply to short
letters, in which Miss Martineau stated objections and propounded
questions. The book points in the direction of that explanation of the
facts of the universe which is now so familiar under the name of
Evolution. But it points in this way only, as the once famous _Vestiges
of Creation_ pointed towards the scientific hypotheses of Darwin and
Wallace; or as Buckle's crude and superficial notions about the history
of civilisation pointed towards a true and complete conception of
sociology. That is to say, the Atkinson Letters state some of the
difficulties in the way of the explanations of life and motion hitherto
received as satisfactory; they insist upon approaching the facts
exclusively by the positive, Baconian, or inductive method; and then
they hurry to an explanation of their own, which may be as plausible as
that which they intend it to replace, but which they leave equally
without ordered proof and strict verification.

The only point to which we are called upon to refer is that this way of
thinking about man and the rest of nature led to repudiation by Miss
Martineau of the whole structure of dogmatic theology. For one th