BACTERIA AND PROTOZOA 21 



her, but the sudden inroad of malaria that carried 

 off the best of her sons, left the race de-energized, 

 and forced her to hand on the torch of civilization 

 to the victorious Romans. 



Just as the genius of Greece quickened into 

 activity the earlier of the arts and sciences, so the 

 genius of modern Europe is to-day extending in all 

 directions the horizons of human knowledge. Are 

 not the biologists following out the great principle 

 glimpsed at by Mendel, analyzing the factors of 

 heredity, and groping after the elucidation of one 

 of the supreme mysteries of the world ? Is it not 

 true that the experimental botanist is using a sure 

 method to recombine the qualities of the plants and 

 evolve new species, as a watchmaker might take the 

 parts he needed from a dozen watches and build up 

 a new one to suit his purpose ? Have we not found 

 that the earth is something more wonderful than 

 any thought her before ? The Greeks looked on the 

 goddess Gsea as the mother of mankind. In their 

 glorious mythology they pictured that men and 

 women had broken into life as the stones cast on to 

 her touched her life-giving soil. Countless legends, 

 expressed in astonishingly beautiful imagery, have 

 told of the sacrament of spring, and the Celt has 

 peopled the soil with gnomes and pixies, friends or 

 enemies to man. Science working with polished 

 microscopes, with bottled reagents, with curiously 

 twisted retorts, and all the paraphernalia of the 

 laboratory, has rent in twain the closely knit and 

 woven veil that barred our access to the mysteries 

 of earth, and as these are revealing themselves to us 



