the front.  The faintly-perceived fantasies of ordinary persons become invested by the authority of reverend men with a claim to serious regard; they are consequently attended to and encouraged, and they increase in definition through being habitually dwelt upon.  We need not suppose that a faculty previously non-existent has been suddenly evoked, but that a faculty long smothered by many in secret has been suddenly allowed freedom to express itself, and to run into extravagance owing to the removal of reasonable safeguards.

NURTURE AND NATURE.

Man is so educable an animal that it is difficult to distinguish between that part of his character which has been acquired through education and circumstance, and that which was in the original grain of his constitution.  His character is exceedingly complex, even in members of the simplest and purest savage race; much more is it so in civilised races, who have long since been exempted from the full rigour of natural selection, and have become more mongrel in their breed than any other animal on the face of the earth.  Different aspects of the multifarious character of man respond to different calls from without, so that the same individual, and, much more, the same race, may behave very differently at different epochs.  There may have been no fundamental change of character, but a different phase or mood of it may have been evoked by special circumstances, or those persons in whom that mood is naturally dominant may through some accident have the opportunity of acting for the time as representatives of the race.  The same nation may be seized by a military fervour at one period, and by a commercial one at another; they may be humbly submissive to a monarch, or become outrageous republicans.  The love of art, gaiety, adventure, science, religion may be severally paramount at different times.

One of the most notable changes that can come over a nation is from a state corresponding to that of our past dark ages into one like that of the Renaissance.  In the first case the minds of men are wholly taken up with routine work, and in copying what their predecessors have done; they degrade into servile imitators and submissive slaves to the past.  In the second case, some circumstance or idea has finally discredited the authorities that impeded intellectual growth, and has unexpectedly revealed new possibilities.  Then the mind of the nation is set free, a direction of research is given to it, and all the exploratory and hunting instincts are awakened.  These sudden eras of great intellectual progress cannot be due to any alteration in the natural faculties of the race, because there has not been time for that, but to their being directed in productive channels.  Most of the leisure of the men of every nation is spent in rounds of reiterated actions; if it could be spent in continuous advance along new lines of research in unexplored regions, vast progress would be sure to be made.  It has been the privilege of this generation to have had fresh fields of research pointed out to them by Darwin, and to have undergone a new intellectual birth under the inspiration of his fertile genius.