NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION. 261 



undue impulses will ever be altogether banished from the 

 system. 



It may still be a puzzle to many, how beings should 

 be born into the world whose organisation is such that 

 they unavoidably, even in a civilised country, become 

 malefactors. Does God, it may be asked, make crimi- 

 nals % Does he fashion certain beings with a predestina- 

 tion to evil ? He does not do so ; and yet the criminal 

 type of brain, as it is called, comes into existence in 

 accordance with laws which the Deity has established. 

 It is not, however, as the result of the first or general 

 intention of those laws, but as an exception from their 

 ordinary and pioper action. The production of those 

 evilly disposed beings is in this manner. The moral 

 character of the pi-ogeny dej)ends in a general way (as 

 does the physical character also) upon conditions of the 

 parents — both general conditions, and conditions at the 

 particular time of the commencement of the existence of 

 the new being, and likewise external conditions affecting 

 the fcjetus through the mother. Now the amount of 

 these conditions is indefinite. The faculties of the 

 parents, as far as these are concerned, may have oscil- 

 lated for the time towards the extreme of tensibility in 

 one direction. The influences upon the f<etus may have 

 also been of an extreme and unusual kind. Let us sup- 

 pose that the conditions upon the whole have been favour- 

 able for the development, not of the higher, but of the 

 lower sentiments, and of the propensities of the new 

 being, the result will necessarily be a mean type of 

 brain. Here, it will be observed, God no more decreed 

 an immoral being, than he decreed an immoral paroxysm 

 of the sentiments. Our perplexity is in considering the 

 ill-disposed being by himself. He is only a part of a 



