superadded, it has been superadded in the case of each and every individual of the species; whether it be also indestructible, and a gift that cannot be recalled; all these are questions that we cannot now enter on. I shall only remark, with regard to them, that they may form subjects for legitimate discussion and reverent inquiry, even among those who heartily accept the teaching of the Bible and of the Christian Church. The doctrine of what is called "Conditional Immortality" has always had its supporters; and it may well be questioned whether there is any sufficient ground, either in philosophy or religion, for claiming absolute indestructibility for the mysterious thing that I call myself (see ante, note, p. 181.) Certainly the Christian records are wont to speak of life beyond the grave as something that is of "grace" rather than of necessity. Eternal life is "the gift of God." But into the subject of Biblical Eschatology it is not proper for me to enter.

And now, I have reached an end, and my somewhat rashly undertaken task is accomplished. If you ask, what has been my object throughout, and to what conclusions I may have fancied myself to have been approximating, I reply that, in so far as I had any object, save that of trying to kindle your interest in a profoundly interesting subject, it was to make a protest against that easy-going materialism to which busy people are, perhaps, especially apt to fall a prey-the disposition to think that everything that is worth anything can be readily understood, weighed, appraised, sized-up, and put upon the market in convenient packages. In opposition to such a view, I have tried to put this thought before you that what we apprehend with the most immediate knowledge is just that which we comprehend the leastnamely, the individual personality, the half-revealed

:

ego, the obscure Subject of Consciousness which we call Self.

What that Self really is can never, in our present environment, be even approximately known; yet it is through it that we have our only true knowledge-the knowledge of existence, of causality, and of energy. "The sense of the ego and of power," writes Herbert, are the only invariable elements in our experience which can be affirmed to indicate something persisting, existing, to correspond to them" (p. 297.)

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There should, indeed, be a frank recognition and a and a fearless acceptance of all the legitimate inferences of physical science. Man has his "place in nature," and he has no need to be ashamed of that place, seeing it is one of authority, and that, in all probability, the goal and limit of material evolution has been reached in him, and that beyond the brain of man, the "force of nature can no further go." Man stands, to-day, a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and worship. The achievements of his genius are the pledges of his im mortality; since they tell of essences that no scales can weigh, no chemistry can analyse! "There is surely a piece of Divinity in us," says old Sir Thomas Browne, "something that was before the elements, and that owes no homage to the sun."

Man knows all things through himself, and he can but measure them in the scale of his own immensity, and yet, at the same time, by the standard of his own necessary limitation. As it has been finely said, if he is part of the evolutionary process, "he is also more than part of it, since he is at once its spectator, its director, and its critic." And so, that greatest philosophical theologian of this century, whose name, as that of a yet living man, we read so proudly on the list of the past presidents

of this Society, the venerable James Martineau, has written―"Man is equally your point of departure, whether you discern in the cosmos an intellectual, a physiological, or a mechanical system." *

Be it allowed me to conclude with a quotation from a book that must delight anyone making a study of it, by its loftiness of tone, in ingenuity of argument, and its eloquence of exposition-I mean The Ascent of Man, by Prof. Henry Drummond. "That he (man), an atom in the Universe, should dare to feel himself at home within it, should stand beside Immensity, Infinity, Eternity, unaffrighted and undismayed: these things bewilder man the more, in that they bewilder him so little."

* A Study of Religion, p. 336.

STUDIES OF TENNYSON:

I. TENNYSON'S NATURE-STUDIES.

By J. MURRAY MOORE, M.D., F.R.G.S.

ON Sunday, the sixth of August, 1809, the household of the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, rector of the village of Somersby, in Lincolnshire, was gladdened by the birth of a son, the third in the family, who was named Alfred, after the greatest of our Saxon kings.

On the sixth of October, 1892, the whole Englishspeaking world was saddened when the news spread abroad that this same Alfred Tennyson, now Baron Tennyson, of Aldworth and Farringford, Poet Laureate to the Queen, and the supreme poet of the day, had breathed his last. After an unsullied life of eighty-three years,

Death's little rift had rent the faultless lute

The singer of undying songs was dead.

A few days later our national Walhalla received his remains, honoured by mourners representative of royalty, the peerage, science, art, literature, and politics, and laid in a grave beside that of his warm friend and compeer, Robert Browning, to the sweet music set to his own. anthems of faith and hope,-"Silent Voices," and "Crossing the Bar."

The interesting personality of this great poet, and the magnificent legacy of his entire life-work now bequeathed to us, form subjects too extensive to be discussed in a single evening. This paper, then, will limit itself to a few of Tennyson's Studies and Illustrations from Nature, pre