The continuous application of three acute and powerful minds along the same line of thought, in the first half of the last century—an unconscious or undesigned collaboration (so to speak) of Lamarck, St. Beuve, and Hippolyte Taine—evolved a marvelous instrument of critical and philosophic research; furnishing for every capable thinker a method adapted to the investigation of all subjects, great and small; neglecting no phase, shrinking from no interpretation, rejecting no authentic fact, and having in perfection the magical quality of adjustment to conditions described in the Arabian tale. In his English notes, for example, M. Taine, if too frank, is singularly felicitous and discriminative in his physical descriptions of certain Anglican types of race—presenting, first, the beastly, repulsive traits of the MALE; the lowering, dog-like physiognomy, the huge jowl; the dull red eyes; the gluttonous chops; the swinish snout, the congested facial tissues; the gross, unwieldy figure, the bloated features and the protuberant accumulations of abdominal fat—thus graphically depicting, by way of philosophical illustration, an anthropoid incarnation of animal appetite. The picture is not flattering, but it certainly embodies some familiar traits, of which it is entirely pardonable to make a philosophic use. Next he introduces the Boadicean or Brobdingnagian FEMALE—"broad, stiff, and destitute of ideas"—with heavy features, lifeless, fishy eyes, coarse, congested complexion, a clumsy figure, large feet, unshapely hands, and an utter lack of style and taste—notably in the bizarre combinations of color in her dress. Moreover, he says, two out of every three have their feet shod with stout masculine boots, and as to their long, projecting teeth—huge white teeth—it is impossible to train oneself to endure them. "Is this," he inquires philosophically, "a cause or an effect of the carnivorous regime?" Plainly enough the cause—the remote cause at least—the determining cause, is what is designated by M. Taine elsewhere as "the hereditary conformation of race." These fat, huge, fierce, vicious, dull, ill-shaped creatures are distinctly of a Saxon strain. In Cedric's day they were the Gurths who herded the swine, and the "gigantic jades" who in the very teeth of Mother Church persisted in a merciless disciplinary "flogging of their slaves." Suggestions of racial derivation are seldom questioned in ordinary life. Every English thinker recognizes the fact. The biographer of an eminent English lawyer says that he combined, in the most pleasing fashion, fineness of physical texture with courage, high character, and the perfection of personal charm. The same writer thinks it necessary to explain that on the maternal side the gifted lawyer "came of gentle blood." Apart from personal characteristics, the very name of the maternal gens bore witness to her Norman descent—a name that has been familiar in Kentucky from the foundation of the State. According to the same biographer the conditions on the paternal side were quite different. An uncle, of the ruder strain, declared, in view of prospective Revolutionary tribunals, that his veins were "uncontaminated with one drop of gentility." He stood among the intellectual aristocracy of England just the same.

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.

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:

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.