of the matter, immense stress is
laid on the Darwinian or Spencerian doctrines of heredity, environment,
evolution, and the like. While, last of all in order, if the influence
be taken as converging towards the reason of the failure, comes the
"medico-legal" notion of a "lesion"--of some flaw or vicious and
cancerous element--a sort of modernised [Greek: protarchos ate] in the
family, which develops itself variously in individuals.

Now, before pointing out the faulty results of this as shown generally
in the various books, let us, reversing the order in which the
influences or elements have been stated, set out the main lines of error
in the elements themselves.

In the first place, it must surely be obvious that insistence on the
"lesion," even if the other points of the theory were unassailable, is
grossly excessive, if not wholly illegitimate. If you are to take
observation and experience for your sole magazine of subjects, you must
take _all_ experience and _all_ observation. Not the veriest pessimist
who retains sense and senses can say that their results are _always_
evil, ugly, and sordid. If you are to go by heredity you must attend to:

Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis,

as well as to:

Aetas parentum pejor avis tulit, etc.

Remounting the stairs, it must be evident that Heredity, Natural
Selection, Evolution, Environment, etc., are things which, at the very
best, can be allowed an exceedingly small part in artistic re-creation.
Not only do they come under the general ban of Purpose, but their
purpose-character is of the most thankless and unsucculent kind. I do
not know that any one has ever attempted a mathematical novel, though
the great Mr. Higgins of St. Mary Axe, as we all know, wrote a beautiful
mathematical poem, of which the extant fragments are, alas! too few. If
he had only lived a generation later, how charming would have been the
fytte or canto on Quaternions! But, really, such a thing would not be
more than a "farthest" on a road on which heredity-and-selection novels
travel far. It is no use to say, "Oh! but human beings exemplifying
those things can be made interesting." If they are it will not be
because they are dealt with _sub specie hereditatis_, and confined in
the circle of _milieu_.

Yet the master error lies, farther back still, in the strictly
"Naturalist" idea itself--the theory of Experiment, the
observation-document-"note," all for their own sake. Something has bee