[76] This chapter contains the substance of the author's Friday evening discourse, entitled “Biology and History,” delivered before the Royal Institution of Great Britain and Ireland, February 14, 1908. The substance of two lectures to the Royal Institution, entitled “Biology and Progress,” and delivered in February, 1907, is also included in the present volume.
[77] “It is thus everywhere that foolish Rumour babbles not of what was done, but of what was misdone or undone; and foolish History (ever, more or less, the written epitomised synopsis of Rumour) knows so little that were not as well unknown. Attila invasions, Walter-the-Penniless Crusades, Sicilian Vespers, Thirty-Years' Wars: mere sin and misery; not work, but hindrance of work! For the Earth, all this while, was yearly green and yellow with her kind harvests; the hand of the craftsman, the mind of the thinker rested not: and so, after all, and in spite of all, we have this so glorious high-domed blossoming World; concerning which, poor History may well ask, with wonder, Whence it came? She knows so little of it, knows so much of what obstructed it, what would have rendered it impossible. Such, nevertheless, by necessity or foolish choice, is her rule and practice; whereby that paradox, ‘Happy the people whose annals are vacant,’ is not without its true side.”—Carlyle, French Revolution.
“In a little while it would come to be felt that the true history of a nation was indeed not of its wars but of its households.”—Ruskin, Time and Tide.
[78] “Literature, taken in all its bearings, forms the grand line of demarcation between the human and the animal kingdoms.”—William Godwin.
[79] See the Author's paper, “The Essential Factor of Progress,” published in the Monthly Review, April, 1906.
[80] Gibbon does not enlighten us much on such vital matters: but my attention has been called to the following passage, not irrelevant here. It is from the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius, Book xii., chap. i., written about A.D. 150—Gibbon's critical epoch. I use the free translation of Mr. Quintin Waddington:—
“Once when I was with the philosopher Favorinus, word was brought to him that the wife of one of his disciples had just given birth to a son.
“‘Let us go,’ said he, ‘to enquire after the mother, and to congratulate the father.’ The latter was a noble of Senatorial rank.
“All of us who were present accompanied him to the house and went in with him. Meeting the father in the hall, he embraced and congratulated him, and, sitting down, enquired how his wife had come through the ordeal. And when he heard that the young mother, overcome with fatigue, was now sleeping, he began to speak more freely.
“‘Of course,’ said he, ‘she will suckle the child herself.’ And when the girl's mother said that her daughter must be spared, and nurses obtained in order that the heavy strain of nursing the child should not be added to what she had already gone through, ‘I beg of you, dear lady,’ said he, ‘to allow her to be a whole mother to her child. Is it not against nature, and being only half a mother, to give birth to a child, and then at once to send him away? To have nourished with her own blood and in her own body a something that she had never seen, and then to refuse it her own milk, now that she sees it living, a human being, demanding a mother's care? Or are you one of those who think that nature gave a woman breasts, not that she might feed her children, but as pretty little hillocks to give her bust a pleasing contour? Many indeed of our present-day ladies—whom you are far from resembling—do try to dry up and repress that sacred fount of the body, the nourisher of the human race, even at the risk they run from turning back and corrupting their milk, lest it should take off from the charm of their beauty. In doing this they act with the same folly as those, who, by the use of drugs and so forth, endeavour to destroy the very embryo in their bodies, lest a furrow should mar the smoothness of their skin, and they should spoil their figures in becoming mothers. If the destruction of a human being in its first inception, whilst it is being formed, whilst it is yet coming to life, and is still in the hands of its artificer, Nature, be deserving of public detestation and horror, is it not nearly as bad to deprive the child of his proper and congenial nutriment to which he is accustomed, now that he is perfected, is born into the world, is a child?