in the books of Kings and Jeremiah. It will still remain true that it was the books in their fuller form that were accepted by the early Fathers and Councils of the Church, and that, if any weight is to be attached to the doctrine of Inspiration, it is the form in which these books have always been known to us that is sanctioned by that doctrine. The Church is no more committed to the opinion that the Book of Job was all written at one time, and precisely in the form in which we now have it, than it is to the belief that the Book of Genesis is a single uncompounded narrative. It is not deeply concerned to inquire by what processes either the one or the other book attained its present shape. It is enough for it to know that, under the providence of God, these books were written, whether by one writer or by more, in the form in which we know them, and that the Church was inspired to accept these books in that form, and to reject certain other books. It will not be called on now to portion out the Pentateuch among the Jahvist and the Elohist and the author of the Priestly Code, nor to reject certain passages of Job and Jeremiah if it should appear that they were added to these books subsequently to the third century before Christ. Whatever their origins and history, they are now integral wholes, part of the literature of Christianity, and guaranteed by the seal of the Church. This doctrine, be it observed, in no way fetters the freedom of critical inquiry, or precludes Churchmen from accepting itsresults. Though the Bible, as we have it, is a whole which cannot be taken away, it is a matter of considerable interest to know its history and the method of its formation. The composition of the Pentateuch, the divided authorship of the prophecies of Isaiah, the dates of the Psalms, the original form of the Book of Job, are matters that fall legitimately within the sphere of criticism. We may agree or disagree with the conclusions now put forward by the adherents of the most advanced school, we may resent the dogmatism of the critics as much as they resent the dogmatism of the orthodox, but we have no right to withdraw the subject from their consideration, nor need it be supposed that the truth of religion will be imperilled by the victory of either party. From the merely literary point of view a parallel may be found in the controversy which rages round the Homeric poems. For a century scholars have sliced and carved at the Iliad; they have parcelled it out into lays, with a singular want of unanimity as to the precise places where these lays begin and end; they have hunted out inconsistencies, they have discovered countless interpolations, they Vol. 183.-No. 366. 2 L have have reduced to a minimum the 'original' form of the poem ; they have assigned to it dates that range over several centuries of time; and meanwhile every one - scholar and literary student and general reader aiike-has continued to read the old undivided Iliad, and to revel in its magnificence, undisturbed by the discoveries of critics or the accounts which they give of its composition. With all its defects, it is the Iliad that appeals to them, not the Wrath,' nor the Achilleid,' nor the assortment of separate lays; and it is the Iliad as a whole which was the Bible of the Greek race, and has taken its place at the head of the literature of the world. So it is with Bible criticism. Whatever discoveries have been made, or may in the future be made, with regard to its literary history or to the dates at which the several books were composed, they can never disturb the fact that this is the Bible which has been delivered to the Christian Church, and on which the Christian Church has been nourished throughout its history. It is therefore with a perfect confidence as to the ultimate effect of critical investigation that we welcome all studies which tend to make more perfect and more certain the ancient history of the Bible. But while we hold that the results of these investigations can never seriously affect the general content and arrangement of our Bible, it is quite otherwise with the minor questions of text and interpretation. No one, save a believer in the verbal inspiration of the Textus Receptus, will maintain that the extant text of either Testament is perfect, and neither the undivided Church nor the Church of England has ever placed any restriction on the zeal of scholars for their improvement. In this direction, in spite of the labours of the Revisers, there is still much to be done, especially in respect of the Old Testament. The textual criticism of the New Testament, it would almost seem, has reached an impasse, from which nothing can rescue it except the discovery of additional evidence. But Old Testament criticism is not so far advanced, and many problems, which ought ultimately to admit of solution to the satisfaction of all, stand over for further examination. To most of these problems, as we have tried to indicate, the Septuagint holds the key. Hence it is with the utmost satisfaction that we observe each step that is made along this road; and if the advance be slow, we may now, at any rate, hope that it is sure. A less creditable, but certainly a natural, satisfaction may also be felt at the share taken in this work by English scholars. In the higher criticism German scholars, by reason of their greater independence and initiative (sometimes degenerating into ex travagance), travagance), have generally led the way, and it has been the function of English critics to test, to moderate, or to strengthen theories which they did not originate; but in textual criticism our countrymen have more than held their own since the earliest beginnings of the science. Walton, Ussher, Kennicott, Mill, Bentley, Walker, Holmes and Parsons, Cureton, and Tregelles are worthy ancestors of Westcott and Hort, Field, Scrivener, Burgon, Wordsworth and White, Swete, and the multitude of younger scholars whose work is as yet unpublished, or known only in fragments. In no field of knowledge do our scholars hold their own so decisively as in that of Biblical criticism, where willingness to work and enthusiasm for progress have been happily united to sobriety of judgment. In no field is better work of the same kind being done to-day by the generation which has yet to make its mark. The special home of these studies is, rightly enough, the two ancient Universities, and neither has any cause to boast itself over the other in respect of its achievements. It will be a noble monument to the schools of Theology in either University, when, in addition to other important work in Coptic, Syriac, Latin, and Armenian, the early years of the twentieth century are marked by the completion of the two great critical editions, now in progress, of the two great Bibles of the East and of the West, the Cambridge Septuagint and the Oxford Vulgate. ART. IX.-1. On a new Kind of Rays. By Dr. W. C. Röntgen. Translated by Arthur Stanton. (Nature,' Jan. 23, 1896.) 2. Röntgen's Photography of the Invisible. By A. A. Campbell Swinton. (A Paper read before the Society of Arts, March 4, 1896.) 3. On the Discharge of Electricity produced by the Röntgen Rays. By Professor J. J. Thomson, F.R.S. (A Paper read before the Royal Society, Feb. 13, 1896.) 4. On the Generation of Longitudinal Waves in Ether. By Lord Kelvin, F.R.S. (A Paper presented to the Royal Society, Feb. 10, 1896.) E MARLY in the present year, paragraphs began to appear in the daily papers descriptive of an extraordinary invention, by which the skeletons of living animals could be photographed through the surrounding tissues. But the thing seemed absurd on the face of it; the 'common sense of most refused to be hoodwinked by sensation-mongering journalists; and for a few days the public mind remained tranquil on the subject. For a few days only. The preliminary intimations were quickly followed up by confirmatory and authoritative statements; actual 'shadowgrams,' realizing all that had been reported of them, passed into circulation; and civilized man found himself the astonished owner of a new and mysterious power. 6 . Never has a scientific discovery so completely and irresistibly taken the world by storm. Its results were of a kind sure to acquire prompt notoriety. The performances of Röntgen's rays' are obvious to the man in the street'; they are repeated in every lecture-room; they are caricatured in comic prints; hits are manufactured out of them at the theatres; nay, they are personally interesting to every one afflicted with a gouty finger or a misshapen joint, and were turned to account, at the last Nottingham Assizes, to secure damages for an injury to a lady's ankle. Who could have anticipated such developments from the beautiful experiments upon the passage of electricity through rarefied gases first shown by Faraday in 1838? Their high speculative interest caused them to be repeated with endless variations and some striking results; and Lord Kelvin's Anniversary Address to the Royal Society in 1893 contained the following emphatic sentence: If a first step is to be made towards understanding the relations between ether and ponderable natter, it seems to me that the most hopeful foundation for it is knowledge derived from experiment on electricity in high vacuum.' But the material welfare of mankind seemed no more more concerned with such investigations than with controversies about the nebular spectrum. To all reasonable appearance they belonged exclusively to the order of thought; no 'works,' such as Bacon, in lofty phrase, invoked to be the 'sponsors and sureties of philosophic truth,' were brought forward to go bail for any theory connected with them. Altiora peto is, however, no barren maxim; and here, as often elsewhere, practical purposes were unexpectedly subserved by abstract enquiry. What may be termed the modern epoch in this branch opened with Mr. Crookes's Bakerian Lecture before the Royal Society in 1878. It is true that on many points he had been anticipated by Hittorf, Plücker, Varley, and others; but he added largely to the store of known facts, and, by his brilliant interpretations of them, vitalised' the whole subject.* The condition precedent to this result was, however, his success in producing high vacua. Let us explain. Air at ordinary pressure is a non-conductor of electricity. It can be traversed only disruptively.' The current leaps an air-gap by a sort of spasmodic effort, with evolution of light and heat. In other words, a spark, or miniature flash of lightning, passes, and equilibrium is momentarily restored. The greater the tension of the electricitity, the wider the gap that it is capable of crossing; still, even with the most powerful appliances, a sparking-distance of twelve inches can scarcely be exceeded. Attenuated gases, on the other hand, are good conductors; and they improve as the pump continues to work. Yet only up to a certain point. An electrical discharge cannot traverse closed vessels apart from the aid of some appreciable material remnant. This material remnant has been fined off by Mr. Crookes to an amazing thinness. He has attained the unprecedented exhaustion of one-twenty-millionth, signifying that the air within his tubes possesses no more than one-twenty-millionth of its exterior density. He was thus enabled to study electrical luminescence more thoroughly than any of his predecessors. The necessary apparatus is quite simple. A pair of metallic terminals are sealed into a partially exhausted glass tube, and are then connected with an induction-coil giving a current of high-tension electricity. Instantly, on the completion of the circuit, a bluish glow is perceived to surround the negative pole, or cathode,' while a column of rosy light, often exquisitely striated, proceeding from the positive pole (the 'anode'), * Cf. Dr. O. Lodge, Electrician,' Jan. 31, 1896, |