1542 The Zoologist— February, 1869, 



no people has ever perceived the grandeur and all-sufficiency of that 

 simplicity. All seek more lame : all yearn for the miraculous : all in- 

 veut fables which posterity despises. One would have thought that 

 Alexander of Macedou had written his name plainly enough on this 

 globe of ours to satisfy the pride of his admiring countrymen ; but it 

 was not so : they invented for him a divine parentage. It was thus 

 with .^neas. Again, it was insufficient for the Roman that he was uni- 

 versally admitted to be master of the world : the founder of Rome must 

 be suckled by a wolf It has been well said, there is but a step from 

 the sublime to the ridiculous : all nations have taken that step. The 

 remedy is now in the course of application. The truth-seeking spirit 

 of the age is not only an antidote to the poison of fables that have been 

 accepted as history, but to the hypotheses that have been grafted on 

 fact. Hence the inestimable value of searching inquiry. Had all 

 historic evidence been destroyed by the conflagration at Alexandria : 

 had a series of earthquakes engulfed the remains of Nineveh, Thebes, 

 Balbec, Palmyra and Athens: had not the printing-press multiplied, 

 almost to infinity, our copies of the Bible, and of the works of Homer, 

 Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristotle, Anacreon, Virgil : then indeed the 

 enthusiastic Darwinian might have seated him.self on a cupola of the 

 National Gallery, and have been justified in pointing to our joint-stock 

 hotels and railway-stations; to our railways and electric telegraphs; 

 to the statues of our kings and the palaces of our poor; to the works 

 of ourTuppers and our Tennysons; ourMacaulays and our Carlyles ; 

 our Wests and our Lawrences; to our philanthropic associations 

 and missionary enterprises; and might have exclaimed in exstatic 

 rapture, — " Behold a people rapidly mounting u])wards from the earth 

 on w hich they tread towards the heaven to which they aspire ! rejoice 

 ye ! rejoice ye ! sing songs of triumph, pagans of self-adulation, that 

 we are no longer the benighted savages our ancestors were : ours is 

 the triumph of the mind : like the butterfly emerging from the 

 chrysalis, we have attained a new existence, new powers, new organs 

 of flight, we soar now above the earth on which we once crawled : 

 we possess greater skill, higher intelligence, a more perfect self- 

 control, a better co-ordination of action, a more complete life." 

 There is nothing to interfere with this exultation unless it be the 

 silent eloquence of those legacies which our remote ancestors have 

 bequeathed to us. Edward Newman. 



(To be continued.) 



