24 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



person possessing certain peculiarities set the fashion, and it has been 

 imitated to this day." And again : " Great models for good or evil 

 sometimes appear among men who follow, them either to improvement 

 or degradation." This is said to he one of the chief agents in " na- 

 tion-making," hut a much better one seems to be the affinity of like 

 for like, which brings and keeps together those of like morals, or reli- 

 gion, or social habits ; but both are probably far inferior to the long- 

 continued action of external Nature on the organism, not merely as it 

 acts in the country now inhabited by the particular nation, but by its 

 action during remote ages and throughout all the migrations and in- 

 termixtures that our ancestors have ever undergone. We also find 

 many broad statements as to the low state of morality and of intel- 

 lect in all prehistoric men, which facts hardly warrant, but this is too 

 wide a question to be entered upon here. In the concluding chapter, 

 " The Age of Discussion," there are some excellent remarks on the 

 restlessness and desire for immediate action which civilized men in- 

 herit from their savage ancestors, and how much it has hindered true 

 progress; and the following passage, with which we will conclude the 

 notice of Mr. Bagehot's book, might do much good if, by means of 

 any skilful surgical operation, it could be firmly fixed in the minds of 

 our legislators and of the public : 



"If it had not been for quiet people, who sat still and studied the sections 

 of the cone ; if other people had not sat still and worked out the doctrine of 

 chances, the most ' dreamy moonshine,' as the purely practical mind would con- 

 sider, of all human pursuits; if 'idle star-gazers' had not watched long and 

 carefully the motions of the heavenly bodies our modern astronomy would 

 have been impossible ; and, without astronomy, ' our ships, our colonies, our 

 seamen,' all that makes modern life, could not. have existed. Ages of quiet, 

 sedentary, thinking people were required before that noisy existence began, and 

 without those pale, preliminary students it never could have been brought into 

 being. And nine-tenths of modern science is, in this respect, the same ; it is 

 the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers who were 

 laughed at for caring for what did not concern them who, as the proverb went, 

 ' walked into a well from looking at the stars ' who were believed to be use- 

 less, if any one could be such. And the conclusion is plain that, if there had 

 been more such people ; if the world had not laughed at those there were ; if, 

 rather, it had encouraged them there would have been a great accumulation 

 of proved science ages before there was. It was the irritable activity, ' the wish 

 to be doing something,' that prevented it. Most men inherited a nature too 

 eager and too restless to find out things; and, even worse with their idle 

 clamor they 'disturbed the brooding hen, 1 they would not let those be quiet 

 who wished to be so, and out of whose calm thought much good might have 

 come forth. If we consider how much good science has done, and how much 

 it is doing for mankind, and, if the over-activity of men is proved to be the 

 cause why science came so late into the world, and is so small and scanty still, 

 that will convince most people that our over-activity is a very great evil." 



In the second work, of which we have given the title, the veteran 

 botanist, Alphonse de Candolle, sets forth his ideas on many subjects 



