But, if the philosophic Taine is severe in his characterization of the "carnivorous types" of the English race, he makes ample amends in his descriptions of others. Not every Englishman is like the landlord in Barnaby Rudge—"half ox, half bull." "On the contrary," says this admirable Frenchman, "when the person is a cultured and intelligent gentleman, the phlegmatic temperament imparts to the English personality a perfectly noble air. I have several of them in my memory, with pale complexion, clear blue eyes, regular features, constituting one of the finest types of the human species. There is no excess of cavalierism, of glittering gallantry after the style of the French gentleman; one is conscious of a mind wholly self-contained, a brain which can not lose its balance. They elevate this quality of their temperament into a virtue; according to them the chief merit of a man is always to have a clear and cool head. They are right; nothing is more desirable in misfortune and in danger. This is one of their national traits." Taine's historic ideal of this type is William Pitt. The awkwardness and erubescent bashfulness, so often observed in English social life, "is wholly physical," says M. Taine, "and a peculiarity of Teutonic nations." It is certainly not the fine repose that is supposed to mark the caste of Never Care. Another type admired by this clever Frenchman is thus described: "The blond maiden with downcast eyes, purer than one of Raffaelle's Madonnas, a sort of Eve, incapable of falling, whose voice is music, adorable in candour, gentleness, and goodness, and before whom one is tempted to lower the eyes out of respect. Since Virginia, Imogen, and the other women of Shakespeare or his great contemporaries—from these to Esther and to the Agnes of Dickens—English literature has placed them in the foreground; they are the perfect flower of the land."
The Section of the Association at Newcastle which listened to the paper of M. Du Chaillu with an air of courteous self-restraint, listened also, and apparently in a like mood, to Sir William Turner in the reading of his very able paper on the pathological aspect of the doctrine of "Heredity," as recently expounded in the revolutionary hypothesis of Professor Weismann, a famous German pundit in pathology. It was the first appearance of the so-called Weismann "theory" before the scientific public of England. Professor Weismann rejects the view that the characteristics acquired by parents through their own experiences or environment can be transmitted to their offspring. It is only those characteristics that have pre-existed in the germ of reproduction: that is, the congenital peculiarities alone; those which distinguish the race and breed that can be transmitted, according to the teachings of Professor Weismann. A German philosopher, for example, may transmit a superfluous toe or a prognathic jaw, but not his portentously developed brain. Sir William Turner did not accept in full the German's "theory." Under the exclusive operation of a law which transmits only from congenital variations, how is it conceivable that the development of species can be brought about? On the other hand, does not the law of the survival of the fittest operate to correct the tendency to transmit defects of structure and organization? Thus, affirmed our sturdy Anglo-Saxon savant, the hereditary tendency, properly understood, is in perfect harmony with the theory of natural selection. It is needless to say that the Section and the speaker were quite at one upon these perplexing points. The conclusions of Darwin upon "Descent" were as little open to assault as their own conviction as to the origin of the Anglo-Saxon race. At all events, an Englishman's established opinions would not tumble at the first blast of a ram's horn from Germany or France.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
(Bas relief by a French Artist.)
The discussion of the physical peculiarities of our ancestors never loses its interest among the thinkers of the various branches of the English race. How trippingly upon the tongue of the Anglo-Saxon child come the familiar lines of the English poet, a bard of the Georgian period:
"Deep-blooming, strong,
And yellow-haired, the blue-eyed Saxon came."
a pleasing description of peculiarities which holds good of the Northern races to this day. But by a process of ethnic differentiation the separate or divergent races, with changed milieu and lapse of time, took on some structural change; the Scandinavian, for example (and possibly the Kentuckian), coming to the front with cranial dimensions exceptionally large and mental capacities to correspond. Laing's curious note to Snorro Sturleson (quoted by Lytton) says that in the Antiquarian Museum of Copenhagen the handles of almost all the swords of the early ages, in these collections, "indicate a size of hand very much smaller than the hands of modern people of any class or race." The Norman is said to have retained this peculiarity of physical structure longer than the Scandinavian from whom he sprang. It was probably the result of social conditions which soon ceased to exist. "Here and there," says an eminent English writer, "amongst plain countryfolk settled from time immemorial in the counties peopled with the Anglo-Dane (Scandinavian), may be found the 'Scythian hand and foot,' the high features, and the reddish auburn hair." "But amongst the far more mixed breed," he adds, "of the larger landed proprietors (comprehended in the peerage), the Saxon attributes of race are strikingly conspicuous, and amongst them the large hand and foot common to all of the Germanic tribes." (Lord Lytton.) Virginia and the Virginian States were peopled chiefly from the former class. If any inquirer wishes to prosecute this inquiry under favorable conditions, he may find a contemporary transmission of racial peculiarities in the vast Scandinavian population in our Northern belt or tier of States—men of the old blood, in a broad, congenial field, with boundless energy and big brains.