HEREDITY AND RACE-IMPROVEMENT. i 75 



are so native to those who display them, so deep seated and endowed 

 with a life of their own, that education and training, instead of call- 

 ing them forth, serve rather to check their development. In a man of 

 genius we should discern self-reliant precocity, a passion for enter- 

 prise, a strong belief in his mission, a pride lifting him above sect- 

 prejudice or party ambitions, and attaching him exclusively to the 

 object of his meditations, for which alone he values life. Even when 

 temporal necessities compel him to take part in the transactions of 

 men, the world is for him only a peopled wilderness, where his soul 

 lives in solitude. 



The materials for such a study exist in part ; they are to be found 

 in biographies written during the last two hundred years, by the sec- 

 retaries of the great academies, and in the autobiographic memoirs 

 left by several illustrious men. An ingenious and learned Russian 

 writer, Wechniakof, has lately published sundry works, in which he 

 considers, from this point of view, the anthropological and sociological 

 peculiarities which have had an influence in the individual development 

 of original genuises. Unfortunately, these opuscles do not form a 

 complete treatise, and yet a treatise on spontaneity would be a very 

 curious and very useful work. 



The aggregate of all the causes of diversity, heterogeneity, and 

 innovation, which in man act in opposition to the principles of sim- 

 plicity, homogeneity, and conservation, we may designate by one 

 name, viz., evolution or progress. Regarded within the limits of 

 positive observation, blind Nature has been ever the same. It is to- 

 day, on the whole, what it was in Homer's time : the same sky, oceans, 

 mountains, forests, flowers. Man, on the other hand, is ever under- 

 going transformation. Generations succeed one another, but are un- 

 like. They are in a state of constant and rapid metamorphosis in 

 their faiths, their knowledge, their arts, their wants. Nation s, like 

 individuals, grow up and decay. But the face of Nature is un- 

 changed : as Byron says of Greece : 



" Yet are thy skies as blue, thy crags as wild ; 



Sweet are thy groves, and verdant are thy fields, 



Thine olive ripe as when Minerva smiled, 



And still his honeyed wealth Hyraettus yields ; 



There the blithe bee his fragrant fortress builds, 



The free-born wanderer of thy mountain air; 



Apollo still thy long, long summer gilds, 



Still in his beam Mendeli's marbles glare ; 

 Art, glory, freedom fail, but Nature still is fair." 



We might multiply ad infinitum these historic contrasts between 

 the immutability of the universal fatalism which reigns in Nature, 

 and the incessant movement of liberty and invention in man, together 

 with the ceaseless striving of the soul to free itself from the grip of 

 Fate. History is but the record of what has resulted during ages 



