STOAT AND SCIENTIST 265 



which occurs once a year or at long intervals; it 

 lasts but a short time, and when 'it passes, other 

 excitements, in some instances just as violent, resume 

 their sway. And primitive men are really nearer to 

 the lower animals in this respect than to civilised 

 man. Love is a somewhat sudden passion, or rage, 

 in them, and the passion of courtship is apt to be a 

 brief one and somewhat violent. There was never 

 a time in the early history of the human species 

 when the female courted the male and invented 

 song to attract him. 



I fancy that when a modern philosopher suggested 

 that the aesthetic sense, the sense of beauty in all 

 things, is but an overflow of the sexual feeling, he 

 was not spinning it all out of his own brain, but had 

 taken the sexual selection theory at Darwin's own 

 valuation, and made the sex feeling the root instead 

 of making it one of the many distinct elements 

 contained in the root. 



The scientific mind in its questing after the truth 

 reminds one of the stoat on the track of its quarry. 

 Swift and elusive the quarry may be, besides having 

 had a good start, but nothing will serve to turn aside 

 or dishearten his pursuer, who follows steadily, 

 patiently, without haste and without rest, with a 

 deadly resolution and staying power which at last 

 gets its reward. The difference is that the stoat 

 makes no mistakes, and the seeker after truth makes 

 many. And that is how it was with Herbert Spencer, 

 when, after working out his theory of the origin of 



