THE ENVIRONMENT OF GRECIAN CULTURE. 193 



which the mouth of the Selenites is provided acts like a file, 

 being beset with minute teeth, each of the shape and sharp- 

 ness of a bayonet ; so that the cutting of a hole through the 

 shell is only a question of time. Presently the shell wall is 

 broken through, and Selenites feasts upon Helicina served raw 

 on the shell. 



So life is not without its tragic side, even with creatures so 

 lowly organized as these ! 



THE ENVIRONMENT OF GRECIAN CULTURE. 



By GEOEGES PEEEOTT. 



THE more closely we study the works of the ancient Greeks, 

 and penetrate the secret of the thought which they loved to 

 conceal under the veil of symbol and myth, the more plainly we 

 recognize that their wise men half-saw by a kind of rapid divina- 

 tion many of the truths which have been demonstrated to modern 

 philosophy only by series of methodically connected observations 

 and experiments. There are few among the present theories of 

 Nature, its forces and laws, of which some hint does not appear 

 to have occurred, for a moment at least, to some of the philoso- 

 phers of Ionia, Sicily, or continental Greece. In the study of 

 man as living in society, or as what Aristotle calls the political 

 animal, they pushed the rigor and subtilty of their analysis very 

 far. How precisely Thucydides described the chronic or acute 

 maladies of the moral sense and the changes it underwent, as at 

 Corcyra amid revolutions that confused all established notions, 

 and at Athens, when a fatal epidemic, offering the prospect of 

 inevitable and immediate death to every one, impelled it to break 

 from all constraint, and excited a thirst for pleasures to which 

 there could be no immediate satisfaction ! 



The Greeks should also be credited with having outlined the 

 doctrine that now holds the highest place in what we call the 

 philosophy of history, of the influence exercised by the medium 

 upon a race and a people. That theory, usually ascribed to Mon- 

 tesquieu, was foreseen by Aristotle, who accounted for the supe- 

 riority of his countrymen by the intermediate position which 

 Greece occupied between the cold regions of northern Europe and 

 the warm countries of Asia ; whereby, he said, the Greeks com- 

 bined the energy of the northern barbarians with the mental 

 vivacity of the Asiatics. The same doctrine was in fact pre- 

 sented a century earlier by Hippocrates, in his treatise on Air, 

 Water, and Places, in which the last twelve chapters are occupied 

 with it. Summarizing the results of a comparison between 



TOL XXII. 13 



