146 THE MENDEL JOURNAL 



misapplied, and it may call into manifestation the 

 nobler attributes of our kind. I should certainly 

 be the first to regret the disappearance from human 

 life of generous and noble deeds, and of altruistic 

 efforts voluntarily rendered. But it is dangerous 

 to indulge in compulsory altruism, especially when 

 it is wrongly directed. It results in altruistic aids for 

 those who do not deserve them, and in return they 

 who give are met with the grossest and most revolting 

 form of egoism. The obtrusive poor who have always 

 been the perennial recipients of charity have ever 

 afforded the best illustration of this statement. 



Miss Wodehouse says she has much difficulty in 

 understanding my conception of Nature. It is not, 

 I suppose, difficult to believe that study-chair con- 

 ceptions of it will largely depend upon temperament. 

 To some people Nature is an abode of beauty, of song, 

 of happiness, of peace, of arboreal pathways flowing 

 with milk and honey, along which float the strains of 

 melodious avian music, and disturbed alone by Man's 

 advent. To others it is a ceaseless battlefield of the 

 vulture's talons and the tiger's canines, and all is 

 ceaseless misery and pain and death beneath a 

 canopy of blood. But to others, those whose lives 

 have been spent in the mountain, on the sea, in 

 tempest and in calm, as well as in cities — and I 

 rank myself among them— Nature is but the un- 

 ceasing operation of irrevocable, inexorable, and eternal 

 processes, which are sometimes called laws. In their 

 operation there is inflicted some pain and misery, 

 but there is also attained the maximum of happiness 



