150 Mr. Buckle's Fallacies. [ix. 



that the son of a Bernardo Tasso gives to the world 

 a deathless poem ; and that a family of three hundred 

 musical geniuses at last counts among its members 

 a Jean Sebastian Bach. In individual cases, however, 

 the operation of this law is obscured and often 

 hindered by a concurrence of unfavourable circum- 

 stances. It is in the case of large collections of indi- 

 viduals, where the disturbing causes are averaged, 

 that we find it most strikingly exemplified. Thus we 

 see red Indians so swift of foot ; " telescopic-eyed 

 Bushmen ; " and Peruvians with sense of smell so 

 acute that, according to Humboldt, they can distin- 

 guish by it, in the middle of the night, to what race 

 a man belongs.^ Extending our view from separate 

 nations to the whole race, we perceive the law in still 

 greater generality. While some nations have been 

 developing in some faculties, others have been deve- 

 loping in others, and the total movement has been 

 ever onward. Each generation has inherited the 

 faculties of the preceding, still further improved by 

 constant employment. Phoenicians have thus spread 

 commerce through unknown seas ; Greeks have edu- 

 cated the world ; Romans have legislated for it ; Hin- 

 dus, Jews, and Arabs have given it religions; Germans 

 have deluged it with systems of philosophy ; French- 



1 Dunglison's Human Physiology, vol. i, p. 729. 



