278 
NATURE 
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upon here, In the concluding chapter, “The Age of 
Discussion,” there are some excellent remarks on the 
restlessness and desire for immediate action which civi- 
lised men inherit from their savage ancestors, and how 
much it has hindered true progress; and the following 
passage, with which we will conclude the notice of Mr. 
Bagebot’s book, might do much good if by means of any 
skilful surgical operation it could be firmly fixed in the 
minds of our legislators and of the public :— 
“Tf it had not been for quiet people, who sat still and 
studied the sections of the cone, if other people had not 
sat still and worked out the doctrine of chances, the most 
‘dreamy moonshine,’ as the purely practical mind would 
consider, of all human pursuits ; if ‘idle star-gazers’ had 
not watched long and carefully the motions of the 
heavenly bodies, our modern astronomy would have been 
impossible ; and without astronomy, ‘ our ships, our colo- 
nies, our seamen,’ all that makes modern life, could not 
have existed. Ages of quiet, sedentary, thinking people 
were required before that noisy existence began, and 
without those pale preliminary students, it never could 
have been brought into being. And nine-tenths of 
modern science is, in this respect, the same; it is the 
produce of men whom their contemporaries thought 
dreamers—who were laughed at for caring for what did 
not concern them—who, as the proverb went, ‘walked 
into a well from looking at the stars’—who were believed 
to be useless, if anyone could be such. And the conclu- 
sion is plain, that if there had been more such people, if 
the world had not laughed at those there were, if rather 
it had encouraged them, there would have been a great 
accumulation of proved science ages before there was. 
It was the irritable activity, the ‘wish to be doing some- 
thing,’ that prevented it. Most men inherited a nature 
too eager and too restless to find out things ; and even 
worse—with their idle clamour they ‘ disturbed the brood- 
ing hen,’ they would not let those be quiet who wished to 
_be so, and out of whose calm thought much good might 
have come forth. If we consider how much good science 
has done, and how much it is doing for mankind, and if 
the over-activity of men is proved to be the cause why 
science came so late into the world, and is so small and 
scanty still, that will convince most people that our over- 
activity is a very great evil.” 
In the second work, of which we have given the title, 
the veteran botanist, Alphonse de Candolle, sets forth his 
ideas on many subjects not immediately connected with 
the science in which he is so great an authority. The 
most important, though not the longest, essay in the 
volume is that on “Selection in the Human Race,” in 
which he arrives at some results which differ consider- 
ably from those of previous writers. In a section on 
“Selection in Human Societies or Nations,” we find a 
somewhat novel generalisation as to the progress 
and decay of nations. Beginning with small inde- 
pendent states, we see a gradual fusion of these into 
larger and larger nations, sometimes voluntary, some- 
times by conquest, but the fusion always goes on, and 
tends to become more and more complete, till we have 
enormous aggregaticns of people under one government, 
in which local institutions gradually disappear, and re- 
sult in an almost complete political and social uniformity. 
Then commences decay ; for the individual is so small a 
unit, and so powerless to influence the Government, that 
the mass of men resign themselves to passive obedience. 
There is then no longer any force to resist internal or ex- 
ternal enemies, and by means of one or the other the 
“vast fabric” is dismembered, or falls in ruins, The 
Roman Empire, and the Spanish Possessions in America, 
are examples of this process in the past; the Russian 
Empire and our Indian Possessions will inevitably 
follow the same order of events in a not very distant 
future. 
Although M. de Candolle is a firm believer in Natural 
Selection, he takes great pains to show how very irregular 
and uncertain it is in its effects. The constant struggles 
and wars among savages, for example, might be supposed 
to lead to so rigid a selection, that all would be nearly 
equally strong and powerful; and the fact that some 
savages are so weak and incapable as they are, shows, he 
thinks, that the action of natural selection has been 
checked by various incidental causes. He omits to notice, 
however, that the struggle between man and the lower 
animals was at first the severest, and probably had a 
considerable influence in determining race-characters. 
It may be something more than accidental coincidence 
that the most powerful of all savages—the negroes—in- 
habit a country where dangerous wild beasts most 
abound ; while the weakest of all—the Australians—do 
not come into contact with a single wild animal of which 
they need be afraid. 
Selection among barbarous nations will often favour 
cunning, lying, and baseness ; vice will gain the advan- 
tage, and nothing good will be selected but physical 
beauty. Civilisation is defined by the preponderance of 
three facts—the restriction of the use of force to legiti- 
mate defence and the repression of illegitimate violence, 
speciality of professions and of functions, and individual 
liberty of opinion and action under the general restriction 
of not injuring others. By the application of the above 
tests we can determine the comparative civilisation of 
nations; but too much civilisation is often a great danger, 
for it inevitably leads to such a softening of manners, 
such a hatred of bloodshed, cruelty, and injustice as to 
expose a nation to conquest by its more warlike and less 
scrupulous neighbours, Progress in civilisation must 
necessarily be very slow, and to be permanent must per- 
vade all classes and all the surrounding nations ; and it is 
because past civilisations have been too partial that there 
have been so many relapses into comparative barbarism. 
All this is carefully worked out, and is well worthy of at- 
tention. 
In the last section, on the probable future of the human 
race, we have some remarkable speculations, very dif- 
ferent from the somewhat utopian views held by most 
evolutionists, but founded nevertheless on certain very 
practical considerations. In the next few hundred or a 
thousand years the chief alterations will be the extinction 
of all the less dominant races, and the partition of the 
world among the three great persistent types, the whites, 
blacks, and Chinese, each of which will have occupied 
those portions of the globe for which they are best 
adapted. But, taking a more extended glance into the 
future, of 50,000 or 100,000 years hence, and supposing 
that no cosmical changes occur to destroy, wholly or 
partially, the human race, there are certain well-ascer- 
tained facis on which to found a notion of what must by 
that time have occurred. In the first place, all the coal 
and all the metals available will then have been exhausted, 
and even if men succeed in finding other sources of heat, 
