VICTORIA.

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume 14, Issue 715, 6 September 1869, Page 4

VICTORIA.

The following are extracts from the letter of the Melbourne correspondent pf the Sydney Morning Herald, who Writes under date August 11: — Our little difficulty with the pardoned Fenians is not to be got over without some small exhibition cf bad blood. The Advocate—which is a sort of Victorian counterpart of the Freeman's* Journal —fell foul of the Ministry, the Age, and the Argus, in their Saturday's issue, because the Convicts' Influx Prevention Act was not to be suspended for the benefit of the pardoned men The article offered such an open defence of the Fenians as to amount to something more than an apology foi them ; whereupon the Age attacks the Catholic party by name and charge? them with seeking to make political capital out of their expatriated couu trymeo. It is mournful to witness the display of itnplicable hostility which is so easily provoked on both side> when causes of dissension arise lik< the present. Kenealey, the first of tinpardoned men who arrived here, aftei having been warned by the Chiet Com missiouer of Police several tines, wasarrested last week under the *' influx' Act, and the case was delayed at his pwn request until yesterday, when the charge against him of being illegally jo the colony was gone into. On the part of the Crown it was contended that the free pardon only removed the punishment, but not the disability created by the Act. The counsel for Kenealey contended that the Act wae inoperative, and that even if otherwise the free pardon wiped out all the con sequences of the offence he was originally charged with. The Bench con victed the defendant, and he had to jfind sureties that he would leave tht colony within seven days. An appeal to the Supreme Court against the de eisiun is talked about. The early closing movement in Melbourne has assumed a form which reflects much credit on the promoters for their sagacity. By one and the self-same effort pecuniary resources in aid of the movement have been secured, a great moral effect has been produced on the public mind, and the for whose benefit the movement was projected have been provided with mental pabulum for some of the evenings reclaimed from the shop. The meaus referred to are a series of lectures by the ablest men amongst us ju the walks of literature and science, presided over by sjme of our most notalle citizens. The closing lecture of the course was delivered on Monday evening by the Rev. Dr Bromby, heau master of the Church of England Grammar School, the Bishop of Mel |x>ume being iu the chair. This lecture is certainly not the least remark aide of the series, and contains novelties of thuught and speculation, which ample food for discussion, if noi for controversy. The subject was *• prehistoric Man." The lecturer Went of necessity into the interpretation of the £ools of Genesis, but cautioned his hearers against supposing that the Bible was designed to teach man either history or science, lie considered that Adam (literally »* Man ") was a generic term, and did pot mean an individual J that the first &%& of whose individual history we

have any record was Cain, who was ->ne of the earliest men of the agricultural age, and who began to build cities and towns. The first races, he thought, were pastoral people, who from the time wheu their increasing numbers made food somewhat scarce, took to depasturing flocks of sheep instead of hunting them as game; that r,heir uneventful lives affiled but little material for history, and that none had been recorded for obvious reasons The next phase after the nomadic and pastoral would be the agricultural, when the squatter would be driven off the face of the land by the free selector Perhaps the most startling idea pro pounded by the lecturer was that all our conventional notions of the great ages of the patriarchs were wrong, that instead of their having lived many hundred years their average lives werr from seventy to eighty. The years of the Book of Genesis he thinks should have been months oidy. The original word might be interpreted to mean the latter as well as the former, being literally a " revolution," and probably a revolution of the moon and nut of the entire seasons. This not only affects our ideas of the ages to which men attained, but of the period of life at which they married, and Dr Bromby endeavored to shew that the Patriarchs generally became fathers at about fifteen, which, "in a hot coun ry, and where trousseaux were so very inexpensive," he did not consider at all improbable. That man "existed anterior to the four or five thousand years which he allows for the historic period, Dr Bromby considers proved l»y the geological discoveries of modern times, especially the stone implements found amongst the remaius of extinct niiiraals and beneath forests which have disappeared entirely from the c>untrie3 where they were buried, and succeeded by other forests of tira hers, also extiuct, and so forth. The Doctor wound up with an eloquent tes timony to the antiquity and genuineness )f the ancient records of the Bible, bu eminded his audience that it was the spirituality of religious truth that made the Bible the word of lite. The Bishop and others who spoke afterwards, acknowledged the abdity and research displayed in the lecture, but disseuted from its deductions.