20 HEREDITY. 



any other assemblies as large and frequent as those 

 addressed by Demosthenes from the Athenian Bema. 

 We find ourselves, although free men, not quite 

 Athenian, even in New England. 



14. Athenian greatness declined for several rea- 

 sons : 



Morality grew lax. 



Marriage was unfashionable and avoided. 



Many of the most ambitious and accomplished 

 women were evil, and so childless. 



Luxury brought in physical vices. 



The -mothers of the incoming population were of 

 a heterogenous class. (GALTON, Hereditary G-enius, 

 p. 343.) 



Is it possible that any one has suspected that I 

 have led you up the Acropolis in order to seek there 

 for some volcanic rift breathing forth the more than 

 Tartarean blackness of the sulphur smoke of free 

 love, or of the leprous dreams of a philosophy which 

 thinks that sound ideas concerning hereditary descent 

 are its exclusive property ? Have you supposed that 

 I have come to this temple of the gods to forget 

 Athenian history? Do you think that we have 

 climbed up the heights of this glorious age of Greece 

 to find that the cause of the strange sublimities that 

 salute us here is disloyalty to natural law? Over 

 the Acropolis and over Boston, over Plymouth Rock 

 and over Mars Hill, over the Academy of Plato and 

 the Lyceum of Aristotle, and over every poet's walk, 

 every philosopher's study, every preacher's kneeling 

 figure in modern days, bend the same meridians of 



