a little unctuous phrasing,
and the thing is done. One great service this eminent and kindly
Catholic champion undoubtedly rendered: by this acknowledgment, so
widely spread in his published lectures, he made it impossible for
Catholics or Protestants longer to resist the main conclusions
of science. Henceforward we only have efforts to save theological
appearances, and these only by men whose zeal outran their discretion.

On both sides of the Atlantic, down to a recent period, we see these
efforts, but we see no less clearly that they are mutually destructive.
Yet out of this chaos among English-speaking peoples the new science
began to develop steadily and rapidly. Attempts did indeed continue
here and there to save the old theory. Even as late as 1859 we hear
the eminent Presbyterian divine, Dr. John Cumming, from his pulpit
in London, speaking of Hebrew as "that magnificent tongue--that
mother-tongue, from which all others are but distant and debilitated
progenies."

But the honour of producing in the nineteenth century the most absurd
known attempt to prove Hebrew the primitive tongue belongs to the
youngest of the continents, Australia. In the year 1857 was printed at
Melbourne The Triumph of Truth, or a Popular Lecture on the Origin of
Languages, by B. Atkinson, M.R.C.P.L.--whatever that may mean. In this
work, starting with the assertion that "the Hebrew was the primary stock
whence all languages were derived," the author states that Sanskrit is
"a dialect of the Hebrew," and declares that "the manuscripts found
with mummies agree precisely with the Chinese version of the Psalms of
David." It all sounds like Alice in Wonderland. Curiously enough, in
the latter part of his book, evidently thinking that his views would not
give him authority among fastidious philologists, he says, "A great deal
of our consent to the foregoing statements arises in our belief in the
Divine inspiration of the Mosaic account of the creation of the world
and of our first parents in the Garden of Eden." A yet more
interesting light is thrown upon the author's view of truth, and of its
promulgation, by his dedication: he says that, "being persuaded that
literary men ought to be fostered by the hand of power," he dedicates
his treatise "to his Excellency Sir H. Barkly," who was at the time
Governor of Victoria.

Still another curious survival is seen in a work which appeared as late
as 1885, at Edinburgh, by William Galloway, M.A., P