102 THE LIFE OF SCIENCE 



tremely frail, and for a while it was thought that he would not 

 survive. But for a maternal grandfather hailing from Bordeaux, 

 he was a pure Celt, and this means a great deal. These people of 

 Brittany, however devoted they may be to their foster country, 

 are very different from the ordinary Frenchman — at least as much 

 as a Welshman or an Irishman is different from your average 

 Englishman. Their idiosyncrasies are deeply rooted in the past. 

 For one thing, those out-of-the-way provinces of the West were 

 hardly touched by the Roman colonization; they pursued undis- 

 turbed their own development and such was their originality and 

 their sturdiness that the most zealous propaganda of the gospel 

 could not eradicate entirely their pagan beliefs; the Christian 

 evangelists who came to minister to them were forced in many 

 cases to close their eyes to older superstitions and compromise 

 with them as best they might. Renan realized this very strongly 

 as soon as he reached Paris, and even more when he first visited 

 Athens in 1865. On that occasion he expressed the strange quali- 

 ties of his native soil very strikingly in the prayer to Athena 

 "which he made on the Acropolis when he had finally reached a 

 proper understanding of its perfect beauty" : 



"O nobility! O beauty simple and true! Goddess whose cult 

 means reason and wisdom, thou whose temple is an eternal lesson 

 of conscience and sincerity: I bring to thine altar much remorse. 

 To find thee cost me infinite research. The initiation which thou 

 didst bestow upon the Athenian at his birth, in one smile, I have 

 conquered only by strength of reflection, at the price of long efforts. 



"I was born, blue-eyed goddess, of barbarian parents among 

 the kind and virtuous Cimmerians who live at the edge of a dark 

 sea, bristling with rocks, ever beaten by storms. The sun is 

 scarcely known there; our flowers are marine mosses, seaweeds 

 and the colored shells which one finds tossed up in the lonely 

 bays. The clouds there seem to be without color, and joy itself 

 takes on a tinge of sadness, but springs of cold water burst from 

 the rocks and the eyes of our young girls are like those green 

 springs wherein the sky is mirrored over undulating grasses. . . ." 



