CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Age of Science, a Newspaper of the Twentieth Century. By Merlin Nostradamus. (Ward, Lock, and Tyler.)—This is a clever and amusing jeu d'esprit. A century hence, the "Age of Science "will have set in, and Medical Science, as that in which men are most practically and generally interested, will have gained the precedence. Lord Archphysicians and Lord Physicians will preside over the dioceses which the blindness of the nineteenth century entrusts to archbishops and bishops,and Parliament will have little to do except to record the desires of a convocation of doctors. The principles of the vivisectionists will have reached their natural development, and humanity, become by common consent a corpus vile, will be the subject of unlimited experiment. The persecuting spirit which the fanatical fervour of modern prophets of unbelief seems to portend will be at work ; to cherish exploded beliefs will be a crime, and the secular arm will be invoked to punish credulity, as it has been invoked in former days to repress the opposite extreme. The sanctions
of religion having been broken down, and the belief in a future life ex- ploded, the philosophy of "let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," will have shown inconvenient practical developments. Science will not have been idle. It will have discovered how to communicate disease with infallible certainty, and will be hoping to find out how to cure it. All this is set forth with no little humour. The fun, though of course it will make some people angry, is quite fair, never bitter or personal.
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