THE PROGRESS OF THE RACE 211 



who has guarded the hearth, be bHnd or very old. So long 

 as the fire still burn that he has been watching, he has done 

 as much as the best could have done. Well for us if we 

 can transmit this ardour, not as we received it, but added 

 to by ourselves ; and nothing will add to it more than this 

 hypothesis of evolution, which goads us to question with 

 an ever severer method and ever increasing zeal all that 

 exists on the earth's surface and in its entrails, in the depths 

 of the sea and expanse of the sky. Reject it, and what can 

 we set up against it, what can we put in its place .? There 

 is but the grand confession of scientific ignorance, aware of 

 its knowing nothing — but this is habitually sluggish, and 

 calculated to discourage the curiosity more needful to man 

 than wisdom — or the hypothesis of the fixity of the species 

 and of divine creation, which is less demonstrable than the 

 other, banishes for all time the living elements of the problem, 

 and explains nothing. 



106 



To-day, on this April morning, as I stood before the 

 beds of trembling primrose, fringed with silver madwort, in 

 the garden where all things were springing to life once 

 more beneath the divine green dew, I saw again the wild 

 bees, the ancestors of the one that has submitted to our 

 desires ; and there came back to me the lessons of the old 

 bee-keeper of Zealand. Moi-e than once had I walked with 

 him among the many-coloured flower-borders, that had been 

 designed and still were kept as in the days of the good old 

 Dutch poet, Cats, whose prosy verse trickles on for ever. 



