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ill-finished or neglected. The bold neglect of Michael Angelo is very apparent. Raphael, with less original genius than his immortal master, had more taste and much greater delicacy of pencil; his conceptions, less extensive and varied, are more perfect; his finishing is always exquisite. Unity of emotion was his great object in design; equal delicacy of finishing in execution. Thence he has attained by universal consent the highest place in painting. "Nothing," says Sir Joshua Reynolds, "is denied to welldirected labor; nothing is to be attained without it." "Excellence in any department," says Johnson, "can now be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price." These words should ever be present to the minds of all who aspire to rival the great of former days; who feel in their bosoms a spark of the spirit which led Homer, Dante, and Michael Angelo to immortality. In a luxurious age, comfort or station is deemed the chief good of life; in a commercial community, money becomes the universal object of ambition. Thence our acknowledged deficiency in the fine arts; thence our growing weakness in the higher branches of literature Talent looks for its reward too soon. Genius seeks an immediate recompense; long protracted exertions are never attempted; great things are not done because great efforts are not made.

None will work now without the prospect of an immediate return. Very possibly it is so; but then let us not hope or wish. for immortality. << Present time and future," says Sir Joshua Reynolds, "are rivals; he who solicits the one must expect to be discountenanced by the other." It is not that we want genius; what we want is the great and heroic spirit which will devote itself, by strenuous efforts, to great things, without seeking any reward but their accomplishment.

Nor let it be said that great subjects for the painter's pencil, the poet's muse, are not to be found that they are exhausted by former efforts, and nothing remains to us but imitation. Nature is inexhaustible; the events of men are unceasing, their variety is endless. Philosophers were mourning the monotony of time, historians were deploring the sameness of events, in the years preceding the French Revolution -on the eve of the Reign of Terror, the flames of Moscow, the retreat from Russia. What was the strife around Troy to the battle of Leipsic? The contests of Florence and Pisa to the Revolutionary War? What ancient naval victory to that of Trafalgar? Rely upon it,

subjects for genius are not wanting; genius itself, steadily and perseveringly directed, is the thing required. But genius and energy alone are not sufficient; courage and disinterestedness are needed more than all. Courage to withstand the assaults of envy, to despise the ridicule of mediocrity-disinterestedness to trample under foot the seductions of ease, and disregard the attractions of opulence. A heroic mind is more wanted in the library or the studio than in the field. It is wealth and cowardice that extinguish the light of genius, and dig the grave of literature as of nations.

From an essay in Blackwood's for January, 1845.

GRANT ALLEN

(1848-1899).

RANT ALLEN, one of the most popular scientific essayists of his day, was born at Kingston, Canada, February 24th, 1848. His sponsors christened him "Charles Grant Blairfindie » Allen, but, as a result of his well-deserved international celebrity, this has been shortened to "Grant." As "Cecil Powers" and "J. Arbuthnot Wilson" he has done no inconsiderable work as a novelist and miscellaneous writer, but it is on his scientific essays, published in English periodicals, that his enduring reputation will rest. Except in the late Prof. R. A. Proctor, he has had no rival in popularizing science, and in the lightness of his touch he surpasses Proctor. sense of humor is delicate, and, while it appears in such works as his essay on the "Scientific Aspects of Falling in Love," he does not allow it to discredit him or to lower him in the eyes of the reader from the plane of the scientist to that of the humorist. His uncollected essays published during the last twenty years are numbered by the score. The article on Apparitions" » in the current edition of the British Encyclopædia is from his pen. He died in London, October 25th, 1899.

His

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SCIENTIFIC ASPECTS OF FALLING IN LOVE

N ANCIENT and famous human institution is in pressing danger. Sir George Campbell has set his face against the time-honored practice of Falling in Love. Parents innumerable, it is true, have set their faces against it already from immemorial antiquity; but then they only attacked the particular instance, without venturing to impugn the institution itself on general principles. An old Indian administrator, however, goes to work in all things on a different pattern He would always like to regulate human life generally as a department of the India Office; and so Sir George Campbell would fain have husbands and wives selected for one another (perhaps on Doctor Johnson's principle, by the Lord Chancellor) with a view to the future

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development of the race, in the process which he not very felicitously or elegantly describes as "man-breeding." Probably," he says, as reported in Nature, "we have enough physiological knowledge to effect a vast improvement in the pairing of individuals of the same or allied races, if we could only apply that knowledge to make fitting marriages, instead of giving way to foolish ideas about love and the tastes of young people, whom we can hardly trust to choose their own bonnets, much less to choose in a graver matter in which they are most likely to be influenced by frivolous prejudices." He wants us, in other words, to discard the deep-seated inner physiological promptings of inherited instinct, and to substitute for them some calm and dispassionate but artificial selection of a fitting partner as the father or mother of future generations.

Now this is of course a serious subject, and it ought to be treated seriously and reverently. But, it seems to me, Sir George Campbell's conclusion is exactly the opposite one from the conclusion now being forced upon men of science by a study of the biological and psychological elements in this very complex problem of heredity. So far from considering love as a "foolish idea," opposed to the best interests of the race, I believe most competent physiologists and psychologists, especially those of the modern evolutionary school, would regard it rather as an essentially beneficent and conservative instinct, developed and maintained in us by natural causes, for the very purpose of insuring just those precise advantages and improvements which Sir George Campbell thinks he could himself effect by a conscious and deliberate process of selection. More than that, I believe, for my own part (and I feel sure most evolutionists would cordially agree with me), that this beneficent inherited instinct of Falling in Love effects the object it has in view far more admirably, subtly, and satisfactorily, on the average of instances, than any clumsy human selective substitute could possibly effect it.

In short, my doctrine is simply the old-fashioned and confiding belief that marriages are made in heaven, with the further corollary that heaven manages them, one time with another, a great deal better than Sir George Campbell.

Let us first look how Falling in Love affects the standard of human efficiency and then let us consider what would be the probable result of any definite conscious attempt to substitute for it some more deliberate external agency.

Falling in Love, as modern biology teaches us to believe, is nothing more than the latest, highest, and most involved exemplification, in the human race, of that almost universal selective process which Mr. Darwin has enabled us to recognize throughout the whole long series of the animal kingdom. The butterfly that circles and eddies in his aërial dance around his observant mate is endeavoring to charm her by the delicacy of his coloring, and to overcome her coyness by the display of his skill. The peacock that struts about in imperial pride under the eyes of his attentive hens is really contributing to the future beauty and strength of his race by collecting to himself a harem through which he hands down to posterity the valuable qualities which have gained the admiration of his mates in his own person. Mr. Wallace has shown that to be beautiful is to be efficient; and sexual selection is thus, as it were, a mere lateral form of natural selection,—a survival of the fittest in the guise of mutual attractiveness and mutual adaptability, producing on the average a maximum of the best properties of the race in the resulting offspring. I need not dwell here upon this aspect of the case, because it is one with which, since the publication of the "Descent of Man," all the world has been sufficiently familiar.

In our own species, the selective process is marked by all the features common to selection throughout the whole animal kingdom; but it is also, as might be expected, far more specialized, far more individualized, far more cognizant of personal traits and minor peculiarities. It is furthermore exerted to a far greater extent upon mental and moral as well as physical peculiarities in the individual.

We cannot fall in love with everybody alike. Some of us fall in love with one person, some with another. This instinctive and deep-seated differential feeling we may regard as the outcome of complementary features, mental, moral, or physical, in the two persons concerned; and experience shows us that, in nine cases out of ten, it is a reciprocal affection, that is to say, in other words, an affection roused in unison by varying qualities in the respective individuals.

Of its eminently conservative and even upward tendency, very little doubt can be reasonably entertained. We do fall in love, taking us in the lump, with the young, the beautiful, the strong, and the healthy; we do not fall in love, taking us in the lump, with the aged, the ugly, the feeble, and the sickly. The prohibi

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