than that
for Egyptian, and rests on it for an argument _a pari_, it cannot be
said in any way to strengthen Mr. Laing's position.

These strictures are directed chiefly to showing Mr. Laing's incapacity
for anything like coherent reasoning in historical matters. Subsequently
he uses these most lame and impotent conclusions as demonstrated
certainties, without the faintest qualification, and builds up on them
his refutation of dogmatic Christianity.

However, it is only in his more recent work on _Human Origins_ that he
thus comes forward as an historian, in preparation for which he seems to
have devoted himself to the study of cuneiform and hieroglyphs and
mastered the subject thoroughly and exhaustively, before bursting forth
from behind the clouds to flood the world with new-born light.

It is deep down in the bowels of the earth, at the bottom of a
geological well, that he has found not only truth but, also man--among
the monsters,

Dragons of the prime
Who tare each other in their slime,

and has hauled him up for our inspection. Mr. Laing is before all else
an evolutionist, with an unshaken belief in spontaneous generation. He
is quite confident that force and atoms will explain everything. He
seems to mean force, pure and simple, without any intelligent direction;
atoms, ultimate, homogeneous, undifferentiated. No doubt, if the
subsequent evolution depends on the _kind_ and _direction_ of force, or
on the _nature_ of the atoms; then there is a remoter question for
physics to determine; but if, as he implies, force and atoms are simple
and ultimate, then evolution is as fortuitous as a sand-storm, or more
so. All prior to force and atoms is "behind the veil." "The material
universe is composed of ether, matter, and energy." [58] Ether is a
billion times more elastic than air, "almost infinitely rare," [59] its
oscillations must be at least seven hundred billions per second, "it
exerts no gravitating or retarding force;" in short, Mr. Laing has to
confess some uncertainty about his original dogma as to the triple
constituents of the universe, and say "that it may be _almost doubted_
whether such an ether has any real material existence, and is anything
more than a sort of mathematical [why 'mathematical'?] entity." [60] "It
is clear that matter really does consist of minute particles which do
not touch," and even these we must conceive of as "corks as it were
floating in an ocean of ether, causing w