230 SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY 



mist, and worked through amoeba and monkey 

 to man. 



Nature is much wiser than we are apt to believe. 

 When an ape with a curious thumb married an 

 ape with a similar deformity, the whole ape 

 community were no doubt scandalised, and talked 

 of preventive legislation and so forth ; and yet, 

 look what the thumb has meant. When man and 

 woman nowadays are blind to all the beauty of 

 love, and marry for financial reasons, the wiser of 

 us with hearts and heads are shocked ; and yet 

 perhaps nature is using lust-for-gold to kill off 

 morally unsound stock. And when Angelina 

 marries Edwin for reasons which no mortal can 

 discover, there is no doubt nature has reasons, and 

 good reasons too. 



The physical basis of mind and character is so 

 complex and so obscure that it is almost impossible 

 to foresee what will be the character of the off- 

 spring of any two parents, and quite impossible to 

 improve the race by serial increments of desirable 

 traits. Who imagines that by carefully assorted 

 marriage or by any method of stirpiculture he 

 could produce a Newton, or a Kelvin, or a 

 Shakespeare, or a Tennyson, or a Caesar, or a 

 Heraclitus ! What may be a virtue, too, in the 

 parents may become a vice in the offspring. 

 Prudence may reappear as timidity, courage as 



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