SELECTION 181 



their Darwins and Vilmorlns, their Gartons 

 and Burbanks; with the one important 

 difference — that these achieved immeasur- 

 ably greater practical results than have as 

 yet their modern successors. 



Again, is it likely that those who could 

 transform the lurking, wolfish depredator 

 into the trusty guardian of their flocks, the 

 wild cattle into patient ox and gentle cow, 

 the wild horse into the Arab, neglected their 

 own breeding as we and our progenitors 

 have done — or even misunderstood it as all 

 historic aristocracies have done? True, we 

 have not their history in the letter, yet we 

 have much of it in the spirit; that of the 

 folk-tales and fairy tales, of which the most 

 childlike and sympathetic of the sciences is 

 steadily recovering the values and the mean- 

 ings; and these old child-tales are even re- 

 turning towards their social and vital appli- 

 cations — above all that of presenting the 

 ideal of love as the quest of life which our 

 fathers called romantic, which we now call 

 eugenic and think modern. Whereas out of 

 all this recovery of the golden age and of the 

 ancient garden of fruitful labour, does there 

 not emerge the idea that its guardians, so 

 much wiser and happier than we knew, had 

 thought not only for the simpler creatures 

 they cared for and ruled and elevated, but 



