GREAT LITERARY PLAGIARISM.
The London Athenæum asserts that Paley’s Natural Theology is copied from a series of papers which appeared about the end of the seventeenth century, in the Leipsic Transactions, written by a Dutch philosopher named Nieuwentyt. It is extraordinary that this discovery was not made before, inasmuch as the papers, after having been published at Amsterdam about the year 1700, were afterwards translated into English by Mr. Chamberlayne, and published by Longman & Co., in 1818, about fifteen years after Paley’s Natural Theology appeared. As Paley quotes Dr. Nieuwentyt from the Leipsic Transactions, he, of course, must have known and perused them. Parallel passages are printed side by side in the Athenæum, for the purpose of proving the assertion.