Enlightenment Humanism Research Articles

Stirner and Foucault: Toward a Post-Kantian Freedom

1.Max Stirner and Michel Foucault are two thinkers not often examined together. However, it has been suggested that the long-ignored Stirner may be seen as a precursor to contemporary thought.1 Indeed, there are many extraordinary parallels between Stirner's critique of Enlightenment humanism, universal rationality, and essential identities, and similar critiques developed by thinkers such as Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and others. However, the purpose of this paper is not merely to situate Stirner in the poststructuralist tradition, but rather to examine his thinking on the question of freedom, and to explore the connections here with Foucault's own development of the concept in the context of power relations and subjectivity. Broadly speaking, both thinkers see the classical Kantian idea of freedom as deeply problematic, as it involves essentialist and universal presuppositions which are themselves often oppressive. Rather, the concept of freedom must be rethought. It can no longer be seen in solely negative terms, as freedom from constraint, but must involve more positive notions of individual autonomy, particularly the freedom of the individual to construct new modes of subjectivity. Stirner, as we shall see, dispenses with the classical notion of freedom altogether and develops a theory of ownness [Eigneheit] to describe this radical individual autonomy. I suggest in this paper that such a theory of ownness as a non-essentialist form of freedom has many similarities with Foucault's own project of freedom, which involves a critical ethos and an aestheticization of the self. Indeed, Foucault questions the anthropological and universal rational foundations of the discourse of freedom, redefining it in terms of ethical practices.2 Both Stirner and Foucault are therefore crucial to the understanding of freedom in a contemporary sense--they show that freedom can no longer be limited by rational absolutes and universal moral categories. They take the understanding of freedom beyond the confines of the Kantian project--grounding it instead in concrete and contingent strategies of the self.

Ethics and Difference: A Response to Simon Gikandi's ?Theory, Literature, and Moral Considerations?

e have credit Simon Gikandi with the effort return us the ethical issues surrounding notions of difference, argued in a his recent article in RAL 32.4 (2001): 1-18, based on a plenary pre- sentation at the 2000 African Literature Association conference. Gikandi elaborates a position that I find ultimately problematic, though the issues discussed en route focus us on the one critical question with which I am concerned, that is, what relationship is there between the notion of differ- ence and ethics. Gikandi opposes a European-centered ideology of differ- ence that concerns itself with nonmainstream, marginalized groups against an Africanized concept, one associated with the history of the con- struction of African peoples according the European notions of otherness. In the former we have a postmodern attempt deconstruct Eurocentered notions of universal values and concomitant mechanisms of cultural dom- ination which modernism was given. In that context, understandings of function in favor of the dispossessed, those barred from sharing in the regimens of power and authority. In Africa, European racialist ide- ologies, such as those adopted by the Belgians and Germans in Rwanda, and elsewhere, were put deadly, conflictual purposes, marking differ- ence, as understood from the elaborations of Negritude Hutu Power, as the excuse avoid ethical imperatives. In the case of the European decon- structionist move, the ethical imperative was devalued along with the uni- versalist claims of Enlightenment humanism. The corresponding devaluation of Eurocentric ideologies would account for the excuse, examples of which are the sacrifices in Things Fall Apart (1958) or Death and the King's Horseman (1975). Gikandi does not mention the sacri- fices in Mudimbe's novels since it is there that the ethnic excuse is reduced by parodic distance the very sort of statement towards which Gikandi is reaching, that is, the need maintain the ethic imperative in the face of the ethnic claims of difference. Thus Gikandi works out a frame in which can be first asso- ciated with modernist notions of otherness, corresponding the colonial period in which European notions were read onto African identities. This difference corresponds Otherness, at its most radical, and attests the arrogant nature of a modernism that assumed its primacy and inevitability. The refutation of modernism's universalist claims, and its cor- responding humanist dependency on Enlightenment thinking, emerges with the second notion of as multiplicity, or, inevitably, diversity. Gikandi writes, in reference his attempts utilize these arguments counter his students' adverse reactions the above-mentioned sacrifices in Things Fall Apart or Death and the King's Horseman, that his response was to call attention the multiplicity—and differance—of these texts and

Max Stirner and the Politics of Posthumanism

This paper explores Max Stirner's political philosophy and its importance for contemporary theory. While our time is characterized by the breaking down and dislocation of essential and universal identities, little has been written on the philosophical roots of this phenomenon. I show the ways in which Stirner's ‘epistemological break’ with Enlightenment humanism, explicit in his critique of Feuerbach, lays the theoretical groundwork for this ‘politics of difference’. Indeed it anticipates many aspects of ‘poststructuralism’ thought. I argue here that Stirner's critique of humanism, essentialist identity, rationality, and moral absolutism unmasks the subtle connections between identity, desire and politics. It also goes beyond the political imaginary of the Enlightenment and, in doing so, allows us to deconstruct accepted political and social identities and radically transform the notion of the political subject. However, Stirner's thinking is not a simplistic transgression of humanist categories. Rather he shows their discursive limitations and calls for a rethinking of these concepts in ways that are less abstract and oppressive.

Ethics and Difference: A Response to Simon Gikandi's "Theory, Literature, and Moral Considerations"

We have to credit Simon Gikandi with the effort to return us to the ethical issues surrounding notions of difference, argued in a his recent article in RAL 32.4 (2001): 1-18, based on a plenary presentation at the 2000 African Literature Association conference. Gikandi elaborates a position that I find ultimately problematic, though the issues discussed en route focus us on the one critical question with which I am concerned, that is, what relationship is there between the notion of difference and ethics. Gikandi opposes a European-centered ideology of difference that concerns itself with nonmainstream, marginalized groups against an Africanized concept, one associated with the history of the construction of African peoples according the European notions of otherness. In the former we have a postmodern attempt to deconstruct Eurocentered notions of universal values and concomitant mechanisms of cultural domination to which modernism was given. In that context, understandings of difference function in favor of the dispossessed, those barred from sharing in the regimens of power and authority. In Africa, European racialist ideologies, such as those adopted by the Belgians and Germans in Rwanda, and elsewhere, were put to deadly, conflictual purposes, marking difference, as understood from the elaborations of Negritude to Hutu Power, as the excuse to avoid ethical imperatives. In the case of the European deconstructionist move, the ethical imperative was devalued along with the universalist claims of Enlightenment humanism. The corresponding devaluation of Eurocentric ideologies would account for the "ethnic excuse," examples of which are the sacrifices in Things Fall Apart (1958) or Death and the King's Horseman (1975). Gikandi does not mention the sacrifices in Mudimbe's novels since it is there that the ethnic excuse is reduced by parodic distance to the very sort of statement towards which Gikandi is reaching, that is, the need to maintain the ethic imperative in the face of the ethnic claims of difference.

Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity

Introduction: the question of modernity Part I. Richard Rorty: The Rudiments of Pragmatic Liberalism: 1. The philosophy of representations 2. Knowledge without representations 3. Justification as a social practice 4. The problem of truth 5. Davidsonian therapy 6. Truth and science 7. Ethics without foundations 8. Liberal ironism Part II. Alasdaire MacIntyre: A Modern Malgre Lui: 1. MacIntyre's critique of the enlightenment 2. Which enlightenment? 3. In defense of enlightenment humanism 4. The lure of tradition 5. The tradition of the virtues 6. MacIntyre and modernity 7. MacIntyre versus pragmatic liberalism Part III. Charles Taylor: An Augustinian Modern: 1. Taylor's historical project 2. Locke and the radical enlightenment 3. The primacy of everyday life 4. Beyond the enlightenment: evil, romanticism, and poetic truth 5. Taylor's critique of naturalism 6. Williams and objectivity 7. Naturalism and hypergoods: pragmatic liberalism Conclusion.

Goethe und das Christentum in der Sicht des Theologen

The popular lecture treats the megatherme in the light of the following double discernment : 1. Goethe - who was a Lutheran by birth and who, on the occasion of the jubilee of the Augsburg Confession in 1830, declared himself as belonging to the protestant church' was not a Christian according to Luther's explanation of the second article of the Creed, that Jesus Christ... is my Lord' 2. The collective being that bears Goethe's name' 117 created an inexhaustibly rich and diverse work in a life-long dialogue with the Bible and the intensely observed Lebenswelt (Husserl) of Christianity. This process was not just about a critical-productive reception of cultural values. Nor was it about the foundation of a heterodox secularizing religion of humanitarianism. Based on the trust in the goodness of the whole, it rather turned out to be the fragmentary attempt to withstand the religious crisis of (enlightened) humanity' 118 .

Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity (review)

Reviewed by: Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity Richard Eldridge Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity, by Gary Gutting; xii & 198 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, $49.95 cloth, $17.95 paper. Gutting mounts his argument via the explication and assessment of Rorty, MacIntyre, and Taylor on mind, knowledge, and value. The position that he defends—pragmatic liberalism—“regards both knowing and doing as nothing more than human social practices, governed by norms derived entirely from the deep desires that constitute individuals as members of cognitive and moral communities” (p. 163). Though the position is similar to Rorty’s, Gutting is at pains to reject antirealism or decisionism with regard to either knowledge or value. Instead, he endorses “humdrum realism” (p. 32) and “ethical naturalism” (p. 56), the latter in the manner of Hume. There is a real world of mind-independent stuffs, and there are scientific procedures for discerning their natures and properties. The worth of these procedures is proven by their success in supporting prediction and control. But Rorty is right to argue that there are no philosophically discernible ‘superfacts’ that establish a priori that these procedures work. Cartesian attempts to ground the success of science in prior philosophical knowledge are fruitless. Gutting’s ethical naturalism is likewise more sophisticated than cruder attempts to reduce away all valuations in favor of explaining human behavior nomologically. There are objective enough norms that govern our pursuits. But these norms are constituted not by reference to a Platonic, person-independent good, but only by what we most deeply desire. Gutting accepts from MacIntyre the thought that our deepest desires are often constituted through our immediate participation in historical traditions. But he argues against MacIntyre both that the Aristotelian tradition is not as robust as MacIntyre claims, particularly in the face of modern science, and that there is a coherent liberal tradition in modernity, a tradition that centers on the deep desire not to be taken in by the dogmatic claims of authorities. Indeed, MacIntyre himself subscribes to liberal norms of critical reflectiveness and conversation between local traditions. From Taylor, Gutting accepts the thought that “freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life” (p. 110) are dominant values in modernity. Taylor is further right to note that there are such things as inescapable value frameworks and deepened understandings of value-commitments (not just shifts of preference). But these points do not support Taylor’s claim that these values must have a source in some person-independent good such as the will of God. All these phenomena can be explained by invoking the naturalist idea of healthy, deep desires. Contra Taylor and following Hume, “nature replaces the Christian God as the higher reality in relation to which the drama of our inwardness unfolds” (p. 132); “nothing beyond the natural is required to make sense of ethics” (p. 159). [End Page 445] Following Rorty, Gutting distinguishes a thick private ethics of multiple routes of self-cultivation, traced most prominently in conflicting, literary narratives that offer options, not obligations, from a thin public ethics of the toleration of any pursuits that do not harm others. “Public ethics achieves intersubjective validity but at the price of moral thinness. The thinness does not amount, however, to a reduction to the punctual self. The agent of Rorty’s public ethics is a socially connected, benevolent self, both a subject and an object of our affirmation of ordinary life” (p. 133). Gutting concludes with a coda in which he endorses the activities of analysis of our de facto concepts and norms (Kripke, Nagel), historical reflectiveness about how we came to have them (MacIntyre, Taylor, Rorty, Foucault), and conceptual creativity (Deleuze). These activities are all in order, particularly when they check and balance one another. There is no philosophical supertheory that combines and completes them, in such a way that our practices could be philosophically legislated for us from beyond what we already desire and do. “Enlightenment humanism” in the styles of Montaigne, Voltaire, and Hume is to be preferred to the legislative ambitions of “philosophical modernity” in the styles of Descartes and Kant. Pragmatic Liberalism and the Critique of Modernity is a wonderful book. The...

African-British writings in the eighteenth century: the politics of race and reason

Introduction Reading Pope/Reasoning Race: Enlightenment Humanism and the Chain's Discursive Legacy Ukawsaw Gronniosaw and Ottobah Cugoano: Perspectives on a Theological Chain Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne: The Measure of Benevolence and the Cult of Sensibility Dampier's Hottentots, Swift's Yahoos, Equiano's Ibos: Imaging Blackness in a Colonialist Discourse Reading The History of Mary Prince: The Politics of Race and Gender Conclusion Bibliography Index

The bases of humanitarian thought in the Pulaar society of Mauritania and Senegal

For the outside world, images of division, conflict and suffering today largely sum up the African continent. Even when these images do not reflect Afro-pessimistic cliches, they fail — deliberately or not — to take account of the secular traditions of respect for the individual and the enlightened humanity that exist virtually throughout Africa.

The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century

For many eighteenth-century European philosophers and writers, the beautiful soul was a symbol of enlightened humanity, carrying with it the possibility that aesthetic beauty and moral goodness would be fused in a new, indivisible unity. In the first book in English on the subject, Robert E. Norton follows the fortunes of this cultural icon, exploring the reasons for both its initial popularity and its subsequent decline as a cultural ideal during the Enlightenment.

Rethinking Blake's Textuality

In this reassessment of Blake's textuality, Molly Anne Rothenberg seeks to bridge the gaps between critics who read Blake's poems as fixed works with one meaning and those who read them as indeterminate texts. Rothenberg explores the connections and inferences among Blake's unusual textual practice, his subversion of authority, and his conception of subjectivity. Arguing against scholars who characterise Blake as a liberatory humanist, Rothenberg uses 18th-century documents with which Blake was familiar, including Alexander Geddes' Prospectus of a New Translation of the Holy Bible, Thomas Gray's The Bard, and Kant's philosophical writings, to show how Blake's rejection of the transcendental produces a critique of the very conceptions of subjectivity, liberty and truth that have been presumed by the tradition of Enlightenment humanism, from Kant to the present. Concentrating on Blake's epic poem Jerusalem, Rothenberg argues that Blake has the appearance of falling on the side of the post-structuralist critics because he was concerned with the same epistemological crises with which they are concerned. However, her use of 18th-century documents reveals not abstract, theoretical reasons for dealing with these crises, but rather the real anxiety that had been growing since the English Civil War about the sources of authority. Seen from this perspective, Blake's poem speaks from his own historical moment while offering significant instruction on the formulations and limitations of phenomenology, deconstructive and Marxist post-structuralism, and radical feminism. By addressing debates within Blake criticism as well as within contemporary literary theory generally, Rothenberg presents a poet who is primarily concerned with human freedom - the freedom to read and interpret independently and the corresponding freedom from a potentially totalitarian authority. Rethinking Blake's Textuality offers students of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and post-structuralism a clear understanding of the purposes of Blake's textual practice, the intellectual context within which it developed, and its value for our time.

The Failure of Feminism? Young Women and the Bourgeois Feminist Movement in Weimar Germany 1918–1933

In a pamphlet published in 1932 entitled “Women's Status and Women's Vocation,” the chairwoman of the German Women Teachers' Association, Emmy Beckmann, looked back at how the position of women in German society had developed since the founding of the Weimar Republic. She painted a pessimistic picture:It is well known how things have developed since the Weimar Constitution came into force. How little it has been possible for women to make their views and their goals count in the machinery of party politics, which quickly srestabilized itself and slipped back into old patterns; how soon the rise of unemployment made women's paid employment come to be viewed merely in terms of competition. At the same time, a new generation of women has grown up, equipped with the education which a previous generation had fought for so hard, and with new rights and freedoms. These young women now see the tasks and lifestyle which await them as an unwanted burden and responsibility, a cold and empty substitute for the fulfillment to be gained from a peaceful home and the close family ties of husband, wife, and child. And, just as among the German people generally over the last ten years the concepts of liberty and the individual personality have faded like waning stars in the firmament of our values while other stars have begun to outshine them, so for these young women the ideal of liberation into a condition of enlightened humanity, which the previous generation followed with such conviction, has faded away.

The Epistle of James in ‘Inferno’ 26

The fundamental interpretative difficulty in cantos 26 and 27 of the Inferno, especially in recent years, has been to reconcile the diverse crimes of two characters as unlike each other as Ulysses and Guido da Montefeltro, by identifying one sin that would account for their common collocation in the eighth degree of the circle of fraud. Guido da Montefeltro, a relatively pedestrian brand of con artist and a near contemporary of Dante's, is dwarfed by his juxtaposition with the great hero of antiquity, Ulysses, whose epic adventure beyond the known world tends to trivialize any of his particular fraudulent acts enumerated by Dante's guide Virgil (Inf. 26.58–63). Classification is no idle issue, especially for a figure who, apart from his ancient notoriety, has enormous appeal for our own age, an attractiveness he acquired by the grace of the same literary creator who condemned him to hell. Dante's Ulysses, epitome of the most ambitious of secular aspirations — a believer, we might say, in the promise of science and technology, pioneer of research and exploration, and figurehead of enlightened humanism — burns in a tongue of flame as does Guido, a wily military strategist, little more than a common crook. Even if we can organize the various crimes of Ulysses and Guido under one heading of sin, the inescapable focus of both cantos is not on each character's lifetime of trickery but on the moment of his death, where the magnanimity of Ulysses and the pusillanimity of Guido appear most opposed. One of the harshest ironies of the Inferno is that such a gaping discrepancy in chronology, grandeur, historical importance, and apparent moral fiber can be cancelled out completely by a single form of torment. Such a stratification means, in other words, that from the divine perspective Ulysses and Guido are without differentiation.

The Perverse Traveler: Flaubert’s Voyage en Orient

The Perverse Traveler: Flaubert’s Voyage en Orient Dennis Porter A T THE BEGINNING of his Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, Laurence Sterne identified a dozen different types of travelers known to his age, including Idle, Inquisitive, Lying, Proud, Vain, Splenetic, Felonious, Innocent, and, of course, Sentimen­ tal Travelers. By the end of the romantic age it would have been neces­ sary to add a number of other types, among which I would include prominently, the Perverse Traveler. Probably no one suggests more clearly some of the characteristic modes of behavior of this new type than Flaubert in his most celebrated travel narrative, the Voyage en Orient. A generation earlier in his travel writings from Rome, Naples et Florence en 1817 to Promenades dans Rome, Stendhal made it apparent that he had no interest in traveling outside Europe. If the Italian penin­ sula was the source and center of Western civilization since the renais­ sance, he saw no necessity to emulate Byron’s Childe Harold in this respect, by pursuing his travels into the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East. The purpose of travel for Stendhal, as for the grand tourists in general, was to move up on the scale of civilization, not down, to go from a land where artistic creativity and the arts of social living were less developed to ones where they were more so. To travel in the opposite direction would have certainly struck him as “ perverse.” Yet by the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, it is precisely that kind of travel which a certain kind of European began to seek out. It was chiefly non-Europe that interested the Perverse Traveler, for reasons that were very different from those of the emergent anthro­ pology of the eighteenth century: he was drawn to otherness for its own sake, the otherness of “ the uncivilized” or of lands uncontaminated by the Christian religion, Enlightenment humanism, democratic politics, or industrial progress. The Stendhal of Promenades dans Rome still belongs to the eighteenth -century, sentimental tradition that Sterne inaugurated; he shares his predecessor’s propensity “ to overestimate” a feminine love object, and the sites and cities associated with it. The Perverse Traveler of the 24 S p r i n g 1989 P o r ter Voyage en Orient, on the other hand, indulges in no such fantasies. He expresses none of the celebratory Enlightenment attitude of the grand tourist toward Western civilization. Nor does he show the combination of tenderness and sensuality for a partner of the opposite sex that the Freud of the Three Essays on Sexuality associated with the sex drive of the normal adult and the traditional idea of “ love” —a combination that has a prominent place in Nerval’s Voyage en Orient for example. In Flaubert’s oriental journey one finds instead a symptomatic fondness for scenarios of voyeurism and sadism. The importance of the 1905 Three Essays for the understanding of perversity was, of course, that they insisted on the extraordinarily poly­ morphous character of human sexuality and on the fact that the sexual drive of the mature adult is not a simple given. On the contrary, it is con­ structed out of a number of component drives that are precariously inte­ grated in the course of the complex process of physiological maturation and the assumption of human subjecthood under the aegis of a genital sexuality that identifies a partner of the opposite sex as its object and genital satisfaction as its aim. Freud concludes the Three Essays with the summarizing comment that “ a disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and that normal sexual behavior is developed out of it as a result of organic changes and psychical inhibitions occurring in the course of maturation.” 1 Given that the various drives are born separately and develop rela­ tively independently, the potential for deviation from the object and aim Freud defines as the norm is great—for the dissociation of the com­ ponent instincts, regression and fixation on pregenital modes of satisfac­ tion. Further, Freud interprets perversion as a pathological structure of the adult human being that results from the unsatisfactory overcoming of...

Les artisans malades de leur travail

Un corps au travail est un corps qui se dépense et se fatigue, qui accomplit une suite routinière de gestes et de déplacements dans un lieu particulier. S'il s'agit d'artisans et d'ateliers au XVIIIe siècle, on devine aisément les conditions rudes, précaires et insécures dans lesquelles s'accomplit le travail. Malaises, blessures, maladies incurables font partie du paysage quotidien, aussi habituels que le sont les salaires insuffisants, les ateliers mal aérés et l'instabilité de l'emploi.De ce sujet, les médecins du temps ont finalement relativement peu parlé. Par rapport à la masse de documents, encore peu exploitée, qui concerne épidémies, maladies des femmes, césariennes ou topographies médicales de tel ou tel village, les livres ou manuscrits s'attachant à décrire les maladies professionnelles restent rares.

Western humanism, modern liberal politics, and psychiatric training; friends or foes?

Liberalism once nourished the growth of an enlightened humanism upon the rigid constructs of analytic psychiatry. The New Left promulgates definitions of psychiatrists that are inimical to the basic postulates of psychiatry. They involve the nature of mental illness. individual responsibility for it, and the role of the professional in relation to it. American psychiatric education is challenged to train people who can cure the ills of society, but would be denied by the New Left the very tools with which we have learned to heal.

Liberalism and Foreign Affairs: Naumann and the Prewar German View

Threetopics follow one another in the opening chapter of the twelfth volume of the oldCambridge Modern History(1910), the one proudly entitled, “The Latest Age.” The table of contents identifies them as: the spread of democracy in Europe; the heavy burden of armaments; and the continental preponderance of Germany. The author (Stanley Leathes) expressed no alarm over the threat to European stability of such incompatible developments. Instead, he chose to comment that “The Latest Age” had been prosaic and dull, as if to suggest that Europe had solved its main political problems, and that an era of unbroken progress beckoned to an enlightened humanity.

Joseph Leidy, M.D

THIS well-known American naturalist was born on September 9, 1823. He very early in life showed a fondness for collecting and observing insects, one of his first contributions being a paper on the mechanism which closes the membranous wings of the genus Locusta, published in 1845 in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Having taken his degree in medicine, he devoted himself more and more to the study of natural history, and few men of any nation have left behind them a longer list of work done than this distinguished man, whose death we announced in a recent number. Leidy was gifted with great powers of observation, he possessed a correct eye and steady hand for the delineation of whatever objects he was observing, he was endowed with a faculty for work; and as he had also an excellent memory, one reflects upon his half-century of work with less of surprise than admiration. To give an account of his writings would be to write a volume, to give but their titles would be to fill many of our columns, so that it must suffice to call to mind rather the subjects about which he wrote than the writings. Commencing with a study of entomology, and working more at the anatomy than at the general morphology of insects, he quickly passed on to the study of the entophytic worms, his “Flora and Fauna within Living Animals,” published as one of the Smithsonian Contributions in 1852, having made its mark at the time. Then he took up the fresh-water Polyzoa, his labours on which will be understood only when a monograph on this group as inhabiting America comes to be published. Leaving for a time the study of invertebrate forms, he next entered on the field of research among the fossil vertebrates, describing in quick succession a number of remarkable fossil reptiles and fish, and he was the author of the first volume of the quarto series of reports issued by the United States Geological Survey of the Territories, under the title of “Contributions to the Extinct Vertebrate Fauna of the Western Territories.” It was during his journeys to the Western Territories, that, not content with investigating the fossil vertebrates of the district, he worked very diligently at the study of the microscopic forms of life which inhabit the waters met with therein, and these researches, so far as one group of animals is concerned, were happily published by the United States Geological Survey in 1879, in one large quarto volume, “The Fresh-water Rhizopods of North America,” which is illustrated by forty-eight coloured plates after Leidy's own drawings. This work on its appearance was received with great enthusiasm, and is still a worthy model for monograph. During all these years, and amid so many and so varied labours, Leidy still discharged his duties as Professor of Anatomy to the University of Pennsylvania, and also of teacher of natural history to the classes of boys and girls at the Swarthmore College. No doubt many of these latter pupils will now call to mind the warm personal interest their master always took in their labours. In one of his books he tells us that since he was fourteen years of age the study of natural history was to him a constant source of happiness; but that on this joy a shadow was constantly cast when he thought how few, how very few, of those around him gave any attention to intellectual pursuits of any kind, and it saddened him to feel that the command “that man shall not live by bread alone” remained so unappreciated by the great mass of even so-called enlightened humanity. The results of Leidy's intellectual pursuits will long remain to testify to the manner of man that he was.

Scientific Intelligence From America *

Scientific Intelligence From America *