228 THE PATH OF DEGENERATIVE EVOLUTION 



schools of science were resuscitated, and during the 

 French Revolution similar attempts at revival were 

 made, especially in the department of politics. When 

 Herault de Se*chelle, being ordered to draw up a 

 scheme of legislation, revived the laws of Minos, 

 in the constitution of the year VIII., the Tribunal, 

 Senate and Consuls reappeared. During the First 

 Empire, Napoleon, in imitation of Augustus, affected 

 a respect for republican institutions, and had the 

 coinage stamped with his own effigy and that of 

 the Republic. In Germany, the Holy Empire 

 which nominally ceased to exist in 1806, reap- 

 peared in 1871. In Greece, the Olympic games, 

 suppressed in 1525, were re-established in 1896. 



It is hardly necessary to insist upon the essen- 

 tially superficial nature of these revivals. It is 

 always possible to bestow upon new social systems 

 the ceremonial code of an institution long since 

 abandoned, but it is quite impossible that the 

 institution itself should be resuscitated in the 

 midst of surroundings which have been completely 

 transformed. The consuls of the year VIII. and 

 the emperors of modern times do not resemble the 

 consuls and imperatores of ancient Rome more than 

 the Christian societies of the present day resemble 

 those of the middle ages. With regard to outer 

 form in the drawing up of statutes, in all which 

 constitutes, so to speak, the decorative side of the 

 institution, the organizers imitated minutely the 

 Jceures of the old ambachten ; beneath this appar- 



