OF

MR. FRANCIS GALTON'S THEORIES

OF

HEREDITY.

UNDER one aspect the phrase "It is not well to look a gift horse in the mouth," illustrates a tendency universal to the human race. There is in us a yearning for the absolute which, though circumstances may momentarily repress it, can never be lastingly affected. We desire the good or the bad, the great or the little, as the Germans say, "faustdick"; and when we have once had our belief in either confirmed, we turn on those who still continue to question and distinguish, as if they were robbing us of our best possession. In all history this consolidation of partial agreement into unyielding dogma is apparent. It is thence that we can easily explain what has puzzled so many enquirers, namely, the fact that talent reaps a richer harvest than original genius. The latter does look the gift horse in the mouth, reflecting that possibly it may turn out a white elephant: the former, on the contrary, contents itself with re-asserting the fact of the gift, which, as an idea derived from past experience, has a pleasing sound to the human ear. Every great effort of individual minds, when it penetrates to the masses, acquires thus a name that fresh greatness may trifle with at its peril. Prefix the word gift and the horse may be "sped with

B

spavins, rayed with the yellows, past cure of the fives, stark spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the bots; swayed in the back, and shoulder-shotten," without the receiver being in the least unfavourably affected. In other words, the influence of the experience of other natures at other times is so strong upon the individual in question, that he does not venture to ask whether the animal be a gift at all, or rather a burden cast upon him by a wily foe. In truth a rose by any other name does not smell as sweet: nay, it may yield in perfection to other flowers, and yet by virtue of its name stand pre-eminent. Compare the names Shakespeare and Breakspeare, and try to decide on their respective poetic merit, independantly of their associations. The one is as Homeric as the other; yet because one appertained to the greatest of Englishmen, and the other to an insignificant pope, on hearing them pronounced we cannot hesitate in our choice. A man named Smith is not merely at an imaginary but at a practical disadvantage. With names, ideas are associated, and though amongst human beings the immense variety of personal appellations renders this little apparent, it is nevertheless the case that, as the rose, from the fact that numberless high natures have loved it under that name, becomes ennobled when the word is pronounced, so do individuals amongst us gain or lose by a mere word.

We fear we may be reproached for cynicism when we say that anything too good affords as cogent grounds for suspicion as its opposite. When everybody is agreed about something that does not admit of a mathematical

definition, say the word "gift," it is more than ever time to open one's eyes and examine carefully according to the intellect one possesses; for it is under the popular, not its opposite, that evil as a rule cloaks itself. Every coward can sneak in the rear of the conquering army, but with the defeated, even the brave may hesitate.

There is nothing to which these remarks more fitly apply than to a phenomenon the development of which is quite recent. It is not so long ago, historically speaking, that science was proscribed: that men whose names we now revere next to those of great artists, were exposed to the most unremitting social and State persecution, for venturing to follow the guidance of their senses. Copernicus, Galileo, and a hundred others of less note, were classed as heretics, and therefore, as capable, from the perversion of their natures, of every extreme of evil. Their strength, however, happened to be that of their generation. Mind after mind adhered to them, in spite of the difficulties opposed, and in the eighteenth century, what had been matter for such terrible reproach became one of the most boastful of titles. From that time to our own day the influence of this particular form of application has been extending. Material triumphs, which the popular mind can fully grasp, have assured its ascendancy, while the logical directness of its processes and the completeness of its results have continued to fascinate the more cultured. The evil, however, of which we have spoken, has not failed to make its appearance. Instead of being persecuted, science persecutes; it follows one from the study to the drawing room, and thence to the theatre and the

market-place, sparing none and taking as many forms as the vaguest of Indo-European superstitions.

In the Middle Ages, Catholicism was often grossly belied by its most fanatical adherents. Its doctrines were strained in the wildest fashion to shelter the whims and fancies of men who, without its ægis, would have been recognized in their proper character of fools and scoundrels.

In the same way science at the present day is made to serve the purposes of people who have as little in common with the true prophets of this branch of knowledge as have the medicine-men of North America. Every mode and style of trifling are dubbed scientific to insure respect and impunity. The effect of the name is immense. If the victim of studious spinsters or other varieties of the earnest genus venture to object, he is forthwith reminded of the benefits that have accrued from past investigations, and warned against the superficiality that makes him impatient of long words and dry definitions. Not merely indeed is science the hobby-horse of cheap charlatans, but actual reputations are based on a bold snatch at the name. The more absurd the pretension, the more ready the mob to gape at the new marvels its fetish affords.

It is against this pretence that we would protest in this article. Science is and remains a solemn thing, fit alone for solemn minds. It demands a wide knowledge, coupled with, what is still more rare, an extraordinary modesty. The influx of mere talkers cannot fail to have an injurious effect on its good name, and therefore, on its position; and it becomes a duty for those qualified to distinguish between its absence and its presence to

root out, to the best of their ability, the noxious weeds that threaten wholly to choke the precious growth.

The only difficulty in the way of him who would devote himself to this task, is that of choice.

There are

so many varieties of the false, that the true only peeps out here and there, rare and far between. Political economy is so overgrown with entities that one can hardly now discern the work of Adam Smith: social science roars and vaticinates alternately, to the terror of the wise and the delight of the foolish, while even physical science has riders attached to it that puzzle the will.

Mr. G. H. Lewes has ably defined science as "prevision based on quantitative knowledge." Without the latter, that is, without an exhaustive study of the qualities of the matter treated of, followed by a definition of their quantities, experience has proved that we cannot have the former. All that speculation which does not recognize and account for every variety of fact that comes within the vision of the enquirer is deductive, or as the positivists would say, metaphysical ; inasmuch as it is a personal view supported by certain external phenomena, not an impersonal conclusion forced upon the thinker by the order of that which he observes. All science is, it is true, deductive, or metaphysical, inasmuch as its axioms are mere suppositions incapable of verification; but as those axioms are never on any occasion contradicted by facts, we are justified in assuming their objective truth. Hence mathematics was the first science known to man.

It deals with

something of which all the fundamental laws

are easily

within the grasp of experience, namely space. The con