
354 NATURE AND LIFE. 
transformation. Nations, like individuals, have their times 
of greatness and of decay. Looking on the face of Nature 
in Greece, Childe Harold exclaims: 
“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 Hymettus 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 endlessly these historic contrasts 
between the unchangeableness of that general determinism 
that rules in Nature and the ceaseless movement of human 
freedom and inventiveness, the eternal struggle of the soul 
to wrench itself from the grip of fatality. History is mere- 
ly the story of what that movement and struggle have 
brought forth in the ages. It is a lengthened drama, 
through which the good genius of freedom strives for vic- 
tory with the evil genius of brute force, in which, under 
the divine eye and with divine aid, through lingering and 
suffering, triumph is won for the spirit which seeks, dis- 
covers, invents, creates, loves, and worships. 
Ii. 
In the first part of this essay, we proved the existence 
of the facts of heredity, and pointed out the part they take 
in the indefinite reproduction of physiological and psycho- 
logical characteristics in man. In the second, we noted 
and examined the causes that work in opposition to the 
more or less imperious impulses of Nature and to the re- 
straints of mechanical structure. It is well now to state 
some practical conclusions as to the use that may be made 
of these kinds of knowledge for the improvement of the race. 

