NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 727 



the known — the development of man in the prehistoric period 

 from his development within historic times. Nothing is more 

 evident from history than the fact that weaker bodies of men 

 driven out by stronger do not necessarily relapse into barbarism, 

 but frequently rise, even under the most unfavorable circum- 

 stances, to a civilization equal or superior to that from which they 

 have been banished. Out of very many examples showing this 

 law of upward development, a few may be taken as typical. The 

 Slavs, who sank so low under the pressure of stronger races that 

 they apparently gave the modern world a new word to express 

 the most hopeless servitude, have developed powerful civilizations 

 peculiar to themselves ; the barbarian tribes who, ages ago, took 

 refuge amid the sand-banks and morasses of Holland, have de- 

 veloped one of the world's leading centers of civilization; the 

 wretched peasants who about the fifth century took refuge from 

 invading hordes among the lagoons and mud-banks of Venetia, 

 developed a power in art, arms, and politics which is among the 

 wonders of human history ; the Puritans, driven from the civili- 

 zation of great Britain to the unfavorable climate*, soil, and circum- 

 stances of early New England ; the Huguenots, driven from France, 

 a country admirably fitted for the highest growth of civilization, 

 to various countries far less fitted for such growth; the Irish 

 peasantry driven in vast numbers from their own island to other 

 parts of the world, on the whole less fitted to them — all are proofs 

 that, as a rule, bodies of men once enlightened, when driven to 

 unfavorable climates and brought under the most depressing cir- 

 cumstances, not only retain what enlightenment they have, but 

 go on increasing it. Besides these, we have such cases as those of 

 criminals banished to various penal colonies from whose descend- 

 ants has been developed a high civilization ; and of pirates, like 

 those of the Bounty, whose descendants, in a remote Pacific 

 island, became sober, steady citizens ; thousands of examples show 

 the prevalence of this same rule — the rule that men in masses do 

 not forget the main gains of their civilization, and that their tend- 

 ency is upward. 



Another class of historic facts also testifies in the most strik- 

 ing manner to this same upward tendency — the decline and de- 

 struction of various civilizations brilliant but hopelessly vitiated. 

 These catastrophes are seen more and more to be but steps in this 

 development. The crumbling away of the great ancient civiliza- 

 tions based upon despotism, whether the despotism of monarch, 

 priest, or mob — the decline and fall of Roman civilization, for ex- 

 ample, which, in his most remarkable generalization, Guizot has 

 shown to have been necessary in the development of the richer 

 civilization of modern Europe ; the terrible struggle and loss of 

 the Crusades, which once appeared to be a mere catastrophe, but 



