M.A., M.D., Sc.D., LL.D., F.R.S., F.S.A., K.S.G. OF ST. MICHAEL'S COLLEGE, TORONTO, ONT. LONDON BURNS & OATES, LTD 28 ORCHARD STREET, W 1919 TO JOHN ROBERT and MARY O'CONNELL A TOKEN OF SINCERE FRIENDSHIP   Listarkin September 1919 T HESE Essays have all in one form or another appeared elsewhere; and I have to thank the Editors of the Dublin Review , Catholic World , America , and Studies respectively for kind permission to reproduce them. Some of them appear as they were published, othe

In the days before the war the Annual Address delivered by the President of the British Association was wont to excite at least a mild interest in the breasts of the reading public. It was a kind of Encyclical from the reigning pontiff of science, and since that potentate changed every year there was some uncertainty as to his subject and its treatment, and there was this further piquant attraction, wanting in other and better-known Encyclicals, that the address of one year might not merely cont

Saint or sinner, some rule of life we must have, even if we are wholly unconscious of the fact. A spiritual director will help us to map out a course of action which will assist us to shake off some little of the dust of this dusty world; and a doctor will lay down for us a dietary which will help us to elude, for a time at least, the insidious onsets of the gout. Even if we take no formal steps, spiritual or corporeal, some rule of life we must achieve for ourselves. We must, for example, make

Initium sapientiæ timor Domini ; no doubt, but such fear is only the beginning, and is not the kind of fear—which also exists—a fear which engenders an actual revulsion against the idea of God. It is to this kind of fear which the eminent Jesuit writer Wasmann alludes when he says that "in many scientific circles there is an absolute Theophobia , a dread of the Creator. I can only regret this," he continues, "because I believe that it is due chiefly to a defective knowledge of Christian philosop

Whether my view as to the cause, or one of the causes, is right or not, the fact remains that by the mid-Victorian period England had fallen to a very large extent a prey to materialism. Many people attribute the sudden onslaught of this to the publication of The Origin of Species and the controversies of the foolish which followed thereon. Samuel Butler, that brilliant writer who has not even yet come into his own, sums up in his novel The Way of All Flesh (and it may incidentally be remarked,

Exclusive and long-continued devotion to any special line of study is liable to lead to forgetfulness of other, even kindred, lines—almost, in extreme cases, to a kind of atrophy of other parts of the mind. There is the example of Darwin and his self-confessed loss of the æsthetic tastes he once possessed. Nor are scientific studies the only ones to produce such an effect. The amusing satire in The New Republic has, perhaps, lost some of its tang now that the prototype of its Professor of Histor

The names of great Catholic men of science, laymen like Pasteur and Müller, or ecclesiastics like Stensen and Mendel, are familiar to all educated persons. But even educated persons, or at least a great majority of them, are quite ignorant of the goodly band of workers in science who were devout children of the Church. Nothing perhaps more fully exemplifies this than the history of the controversy respecting the subject whose name is set down as the title of this paper. For centuries a controver