VIII. 



THE TWOFOLD IDENTITY OF PARENT 

 AND OFFSPRING. 



PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS. 



In a letter to the historian Tacitus, the younger 

 Pliny says that when the volcanic ashes and cinders 

 which covered Pompeii were shooting upward in 

 deluges from the throat of Vesuvius, and were falling 

 on his own head in the dense, unnatural darkness, he 

 thought that the end of the world had come, and 

 that, very possibly, there were no gods. His uncle, 

 the elder Plin} r , was killed by a whiff of sulphur 

 rising from a rift near a sailcloth on which he had 

 lain down to rest on the shore of the bay of Naples. 

 (Pliny, book vi., letters 16 and 20.) Many a college 

 undergraduate, when passing through the early 

 awakening of his intellectual life, has a storm of 

 questions fall upon him like Vesuvian ashes and 

 darkness ; and he very often concludes, with Pliny, 

 that there are no gods, and that the end of the work] 

 lias come. When you pray, next Thursday, for col- 

 leges, remember callow sceptics, honest young men, 

 who can ask more questions than they can answer, 



