The Zoologist — Febeuarv, 1869. 1541 



Byron, again, was no Darwinian ; he could not discern symjDtoms of 

 an approaching Utopia in any of the lands his hero visited : everything 

 told him that, while earth, sea and sky retained all the attributes of 

 beauty and power, man had dwindled. 



The instances of decay which I have cited are familiar to everyone, 

 and are but so many evidences of the "reign of law." If we extend 

 the inquiry to the New World, the researches of Stephens in Central 

 America, the pages of Robertson's History, the novels of Fenimore 

 Cooper; none of them written with this object, all tend to show how 

 universal is the law. The very title of the ' Last of the Mohicans,' like 

 Gibbon's ' Decline and Fall,' is a faint but most ample acknowledgment 

 of an irresistible truth. Objectors will say. In all these cases, the 

 extinction, the decay, has been the result of violence : the Dodo, the 

 Auk, the Egyptian, Carthaginian, Roman, Greek, Assyrian, Toltec, 

 Mexican and Mohican, have met with a violent death. Yes: but 

 why ? Because, in their depauperated state, they could not hold 

 their own ; they could not maintain their ground. In almost every 

 instance the wane has been slow and gradual, and the philosopher 

 reading the 'Decline and Fall' and the 'Last of the Mohicans' may 

 trace day by day the slowly weakening process of decay before the 

 final blow came. As the giant oak that has stood immovable for a 

 thousand years, and has braved ten thousand storms, submits, bit by^ 

 bit, day by day, to the silent, the unseen attacks of minute insects, 

 of rain-drops that follow in their tracks, of Fungi that feed on 

 rottenness, and at last succumbs to some sudden blast, and falls: 

 so has it been with every nation and with every people. 



It has been said that there was something peculiar and excep- 

 tional in the decline of the peoples I have cited, and that there has 

 been no subsequent instance of decadence. I doubt whether even this 

 will hold good ; I doubt whether a change is not coming over other 

 peoples: we do not now fear an invasion of the Danes: we do not 

 read of Van Tromp leading the Dutch up to the very walls of the 

 Tower: we do not hear of Spain fitting out an invincible Armada 

 or discovering and annexing a world. We do not read of the 

 Moslems overrunning Europe. What is implied by the retreat of the 

 Turks from Spain ? What meant the term " sick man," applied by the 

 late Emperor Nicholas to Turkey ? Evolution, progress or what ? 



Authentic history finds every people in the zenith of its glory : pro- 

 bably that very glory is the primary cause of the historian's labours. 

 Yet no people has ever been satisfied with the grand simplicity of truth ; 



