ous service. He retired from the army for a season in 1777, but entered it again as a volunteer, and was present at the taking of Burgoyne at Saratoga. He was father of the distinguished judge and jurist, William Prescott, LL.D., and grandfather of the celebrated historian, William H. Prescott, LL.D., who has done so much to honor American literature at home and abroad. After the war he returned to his home in Groton, where he lived, and died in 1795, at the age of sixty-nine.*

Gen. Joseph Warren was an eminent physician, born at Roxbury, Mass., in 1741, and was 34 years old at the time of the battle. He had made himself very active in political affairs, in the year immediately preceding the Revolution. In the month of March, before the battle, he had given the oration in the old South Church, commemorative of the massacre of 1770, though the British officers in Boston had threatened the life of any man who should dare to speak in public on that occasion. He was, at the time of his death, president of the Massachusetts Congress, so called, and also chairman of the Committee of Safety. He mingled freely with the common people, though he was a graduate of Harvard College, and a polished scholar. He held familiar intercourse with the patriotic mechanics and laboring classes, and was greatly beloved by them. The circumstances of his death, as we have already said, were such as to cause a very great mourning for him, and his memory is sacredly embalmed

*The following is a picture of Colonel Prescott, from the pen of General Burbeck, and preserved in Colonel Swett's narrative of the battle of Bunker Hill: "Figure to yourself a man of sixty [mistake], six feet high, and somewhat round-shouldered, sun-burned from exposure, with coarse leather shoes and blue stockings, coarse, home-spun small-clothes, a red waistcoat, and a calico banian, answering to the sack worn at the present day, a three-cornered hat with a red cockade, and a bandoleer or belt, with a sword hung high up under the left arm. You will say that it is a complete caricature; but such was the fact, and such was the dress of the heroes who fought at the battle of Bunker Hill.”

The following is from the pen of Colonel Swett himself, and is a graphic description of Colonel Prescott as he appeared and acted immediately after the battle: "Prescott repaired to Cambridge, furious as a lion driven from his lair, foaming with indignation at the want of support when victory was in his grasp―a victory dearly purchased with the precious blood of his soldiers, family, and friends. He demanded but two fresh regiments of Ward, and pledged his life with these to drive the enemy to their boats. He had not yet done enough to satisfy himself, though he had done enough to satisfy his country. He had not, indeed, secured final victory, but he had secured a glorious immortality."

in the hearts of the American people. He had been made a major-general by the Massachusetts Congress only three days before the battle, and might have taken the command on the field, but chose to act in the capacity of a volunteer soldier.

Gen. Seth Pomeroy, a native of Peekskill, N. Y., but then resident at Northampton, Mass., was another hero, who fought that day as a private soldier, though with the rank and title of brigadier-general. He also had seen much military service before. He was made a captain in the army in 1744, was at the taking of Louisburg and in other important actions. He must have been not far from 55 years old at the Bunker Hill battle, and fought heroically in the ranks, encountering imminent dangers, but fortunately escaped alive.

Col. Thomas Knowlton was one who gathered a shining glory about his name on that day. He was born at Boxford, Mass., in 1740, but while he was yet very young, his father's family removed to Ashford, Ct. He was a captain in this action and was put in command of some 200 Connecticut troops, and by them, under his direction, that line of fence was constructed-Stark's men completing what remained unfinished. It was a common saying of Gen. Putnam, that these raw troops would fight well enough if you could only protect their legs. They did not mind about their heads. This fence fortification, made of stones and rails and new-mown grass, might naturally enough have been a thing for sport to those veteran British battalions, but it played a very important part in the battle. Had that fence been broken through, as the British confidently expected, the action would have been short and the victory, for the British, decisive. As it was, that fence was never broken through, and the victory, when it came, had for the British almost the moral disaster of a defeat. Knowlton was made colonel for his brave and brilliant service that day, and was a favorite officer in the revolutionary army.

John Stark, a native of Londonderry, N. H., born in 1728, and at this time 47 years old, had a name which was ever associated with bold adventure and heroic daring. He marched his men in from Medford that afternoon, across the neck, through the British fire from the ships, and would not suffer his soldiers to break their ranks and run across, every man for

himself. He kept them in military order, that they might be fresh and ready for the battle. He shares with Knowlton in the glory of defending the fence, and inflicting the most terrible injury upon Howe's brave grenadiers. Stark's major, Andrew McClary, was a man of splendid form and majestic proportions, being nearly six feet and a half in height, as brave and heroic in action as Stark himself. After the battle he went back to Medford for bandages and materials for the wounded, and on his return was torn to pieces by a cannon-ball from one of the British ships. Some one remarked, on hearing of his sad death, that he was a man of such largeness of body and soul, that nothing less than a cannon-ball was worthy of being the instrument of his death.

Many other names might properly be dwelt upon. But there is one that should be especially noticed, though standing in a somewhat different relation. Col. Richard Gridley, at this time 65 years old, was the engineer who laid out and superintended the construction of this fort on Breed's Hill, and took an active part in the battle that followed, being wounded in the thigh. Upon receiving his wound he was taken into his sulky to be carried from the field, but from some hindrance was taken out again, when almost immediately the horse was killed and the sulky riddled with British balls. Considering in how little time his redoubt was built, it proved to be one of remarkable skill and strength, and it received very handsome compliments from British officers and engineers.

But in writing of any heroic action like this, it is a painful consideration that only a few persons can be mentioned by name, while the great work, after all, is performed by a multitude of unnamed heroes, who stand (in their lot) to execute the trust committed into their hands. Those 2,000 men, more or less, who stood firm on Bunker Hill that day, died, for the most part, without knowing more than a small portion of what they had accomplished. Whether they fell on that field, or died of wounds there received, or lived out the allotted term of life, and died in their homes, most of them passed away before this opening battle of the Revolution had come to be recognized for what it was, or set in its true relations to after history.

ARTICLE VII. — MODERN PHILOSOPHY AND THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION.

First Principles. By HERBERT SPENCER. Third edition. London, 1870.

Principles of Biology. By HERBERT SPENCER. London, 1864. Principles of Psychology. By HERBERT SPENCER. Second edition. London, 1870.

THE Empirical, or Experimental Philosophy of the last two or three hundred years is rather a revolution in character than a change of opinions; that is, it has resulted less from the detection of previous errors and the discovery of new truths than from an altered condition or habit of mind leading along new lines into a new domain of thought. It is not so much true that earlier forms of philosophy have been discarded because found to be false, as that they have been forsaken simply because all interest in them has expired. Of course, the change of opinions has been radical and profound, but it rests in large measure upon this profounder change of character involving the substitution of other sympathies and other objects of study for the old ones. Mr. Herbert Spencer, for example, differs from one of the schoolmen or one of the Alexandrian theologians far more in feeling than in ideas. The interest of the one is not the interest of the other, the domain of the one not the domain of the other; and the separateness here is very much wider than between the mere intellectual conclusions which they have severally reached.

There are two sides to every object in nature, the known and the unknown; the former by which it reaches the consciousness through the senses, the latter insensible to us and therefore not directly represented in consciousness. Both are alike in this, that we are equally convinced of the existence of both; not more of the sensible properties themselves than of the inscrutable something which underlies them. What is true of one phenomenon is true of all. The universe as a whole has its

obverse and reverse sides; the one turned towards us, which we know because we are conscious of it, the other turned away from us towards the dark, of which we only know that it is there. Strangely enough, as it would seem, it is this reverse and dark side of nature which first excited the curiosity and the reflective faculties of man. Philosophic thought does not begin with the obvious phenomenon but with the occult essence; not with the perceptible effect but with the hidden cause beyond. The reason, no doubt, is that during the era of infancy, whether in the individual or the race, the mind had become habituated to the forms of the universe in advance of the awakening of the intellect; the phenomena had entered into possession gradually and silently without causing any surprise or raising any questions. Familiarity bred indifference. What we now call the glory and wonder of the universe, the external forms which make it impressive to the reason and imagination, were nearly inoperative in the unsophisticated consciousness of primitive men. They were not startled by the fact of their own being or by the environment in which they found themselves, but accepted the world, as childhood does still, without astonishment or inquisitiveness, making use of it for the various purposes of life, but otherwise not interested in it at all. Thought arose with the detection of the interior mystery of being, the world behind the veil whose existence is certain but whose nature is unmanifested. What in their innermost essence are all things? how have they arisen? whence do they come and whither do they tend? What they are on the outward side of them, the fluctuating and fleeting phenomena which touch the senses, is no very great matter and is well enough known already. But their origin, their essence, and their destiny are not known, and these therefore became the first serious inquiries of the mind. The results are to be found, not alone in the innumerable systems of metaphysics and ontology of the last 2,500 years, but more abundant and impressive still in the religions of the great races, African, Arabian, and Aryan; and in their arts, their literatures, and their social order. The whole multiform civilization which has passed, or is passing away, with all its immense activities and productiveness, is characterized by these two things: the first,