e of any question to a dull speech in behalf of the right.

When one takes the book piecemeal, however, the author's statements of
his own observations and analysis are so thorough and so admirable, his
drawings so good, and the interest of many separate portions so great,
that it seems hardly fair to complain of the rather fragmentary effect
of their combination, and the rather obscure tenor of the whole.
Professor Clark holds that the old doctrine, _Omne vivum ex ovo_, is now
virtually abandoned by all, since all admit the origin of vast numbers
of animated individuals by budding and self-division. There are, in
fact, types of animals, as the Zooephyta, where these appear the normal
modes of reproduction, and the egg only an exceptional process. From
this he thinks it but a slight step to admit the possibility of
spontaneous generation, and he accordingly does admit it. Touching the
development theory, his conclusion is that the barriers between the five
great divisions of the animal world are insurmountable, but "that, by
the multiplication and intensifying of individual differences, and the
projection of these upon the branching lines of the courses of
development from a lower to a higher life, the diverse and successively
more elevated types among each grand division have originated upon this
globe." (p. 248.) This sentence, if any, gives the key-note of the book.
To say that this is one of its clearest statements, may help to justify
the above criticisms on the rest.

_A Noble Life._ By the Author of "John Halifax, Gentleman," etc. New
York: Harper and Brothers. 1866.

The story of a man born cruelly deformed and infirm, with a body
dwarfish, but large enough to hold a good heart and clear brain,--and of
such a man's living many years of pain, happy in the blessings which his
great wealth and high rank, and, above all, his noble nature, enable him
to confer on every one approaching him,--could hardly have been told
more simply and pathetically than it is in this book, but it might
certainly have been told more briefly. The one slight incident of the
fiction--the marriage of the Earl of Cainforth's _protegee_ and
protectress and dearest friend to his worthless cousin, who, having
found out that the heirless Earl will leave her his fortune, wins her
heart by deceit, and then does his worst to break it--occurs when the
book is half completed, and scarcely suffices to interest, since it is
so obvious what the end