he cannot if he would rest satisfied till he have pushed to its full circumference whatever fragmentary arc of truth he has been able to trace with the compasses of his mind. Give to Science her undisputed prerogative in the realm of matter, and she must become, whether she will or no, the tributary of Faith. Invisibilia enim ipsius [Dei] a creatura mundi per ea quæ facta sunt intellecta. Whatever else Science may accomplish, she will never contrive to make all men equally tall in body or mind. By labor-saving expedients she may multiply every man's hands by fifty, but she can never find a substitute for the planning and directing head; nor, though she abolish space and time, can she endow electricity and vibration with the higher functions of soul. The more she makes one lobe of the brain Aristotelian, so much more will the other intrigue for an invitation to the banquet of Plato. Theology will find out in good time that there is no atheism at once so stupid and so harmful as the fancying God to be afraid of any knowledge with which He has enabled Man to equip himself. Should the doctrines of Natural Selection, Survival of the Fittest, and Heredity be accepted as Laws of Nature, they must profoundly modify the thought of men and, consequently, their action. But we should remember that it is the privilege and distinction of man to mitigate natural laws, and to make them his partners if he cannot make them his servants. Human nature is too expansive a force to be safely bottled up in any scientific formula, however incontrovertible. I should be glad to speculate also on the effect of the tendency of population towards great cities; no new thing, but intensified as never before by increased and increasing ease of locomutation. The evil is intensified by the fact that this migration is recruited much more largely from the helpless than from the energetic class of the rural population; and it is not only an evil but a danger where, as with us, suffrage has no precautionary limits. If no remedy be possible, a palliative should be sought in whatever will make the country more entertaining; as in village libraries that may turn solitude into society, and in a more thorough and intelligent teaching of natural history in our public schools. The ploughman who is also a naturalist runs his furrow through the most interesting museum in the world. To discuss the cohesive or disruptive forces of Race and of Nationality might tempt me still to linger, but I have kept the reader quite long enough from the book itself. I have barely touched on several points on which it has roused or quickened thought. So far as the material prosperity of mankind is concerned, the review is by no means discomforting, and as I am one of those who believe that only when the bodily appetites of man are satisfied, does he become first conscious of a spiritual hunger and thirst that demand quite other food to appease them, so we may say, with some confidence, sicut patribus erit Deus nobis. THE OLD ENGLISH DRAMATISTS I INTRODUCTORY WHEN the rule limiting speeches to an hour was adopted by Congress, which was before most of you were born, an eminent but somewhat discursive person spent more than that measure of time in convincing me that whoever really had anything to say could say it in less. I then and there acquired a conviction of this truth, which has only strengthened with years. Yet whoever undertakes to lecture must adapt his discourse to the law which requires such exercises to be precisely sixty minutes long, just as a certain standard of inches must be reached by one who would enter the army. If one has been studying all his life how to be terse, how to suggest rather than to expound, how to contract rather than to dilate, something like a strain is put upon the conscience by this necessity of giving the full measure of words, without reference to other considerations which a judicious ear may esteem of more importance. Instead of saying things compactly and pithily, so that they may be easily carried away, one is tempted into a certain generosity and circumambience of phrase, which, if not adapted |