ve us a single ounce of it. The only
argument he has for a future state is advanced on the last page, and he
retires at the moment he has an opportunity of proving his case.

Professor Stokes says: "I fear I have occupied your time too long. We
fear so too." "These are dark subjects," he adds. True, and he has not
illuminated them. There is positively no evidence of a future life. The
belief is a conjecture, and we must die to prove or disprove it.

PAUL BERT *

Victor Hugo and Gambetta have their places in the Pantheon of history,
and Death is beginning his harvest among the second rank of the founders
of the present French Republic, Every one of these men was an earnest
Freethinker as well as a staunch Republican. Paul Bert, who has just
died at Tonquin at the post of duty, was one of the band of patriots
who gathered round Gambetta in his Titanic organisation of the National
Defence; a band from which has come most of those who have since been
distinguished in the public life of France. After the close of the war,
Paul Bert became a member of the National Assembly, in which he has
held his seat through all political changes. As a man of science he was
eminent and far-shining, being not a mere _doctrinaire_ but a practical
experimentalist whose researches were of the highest interest and
importance. His _Manual of Elementary Science_, which has been recently
translated into English, is in use in nearly every French school, and
there is no other volume of the kind that can be compared with it for
a moment. As a friend and promoter of general education, Paul Bert was
without a rival. He strove in season and out of season to raise the
standard of instruction, to elevate the status of teachers, and to free
them from the galling tyranny of priests. It is not too much to say
that Paul Bert was the idol of nine-tenths of the schoolmasters and
schoolmistresses in the French rural districts, where the evils he
helped to remove had been most rampant.

* November 21, 1886.

This distinguished Frenchman is now dead at the comparatively early age
of fifty-three. Although his illness was so serious, the French premier
telegraphed that it would be impolitic for the Resident General to leave
Tonquin suddenly. Thereupon Paul Bert replied, "You are right; it is
better to die at my post than for me to quit Tonquin at the present
moment." That dispatch was the last he was able to send himself.
Subsequent dispatches came,