ity.' When, in former times; our ancestors
thought of an antiquarian, they described him as occupied with coins,
and medals, and Druids' stones; these were then the characteristic
records of the decipherable past, and it was with these that
decipherers busied themselves. But now there are other relics; indeed,
all matter is become such. Science tries to find in each bit of earth
the record of the causes which made it precisely what it is; those
forces have left their trace, she knows, as much as the tact and hand
of the artist left their mark on a classical gem. It would be tedious
(and it is not in my way) to reckon up the ingenious questionings by
which geology has made part of the earth, at least, tell part of its
tale; and the answers would have been meaningless if physiology and
conchology and a hundred similar sciences had not brought their aid.
Such subsidiary sciences are to the decipherer of the present day what
old languages were to the antiquary of other days; they construe for
him the words which he discovers, they give a richness and a truth-like
complexity to the picture which he paints, even in cases where the
particular detail they tell is not much. But what here concerns me is
that man himself has, to the eye of science, become 'an antiquity.' She
tries to read, is beginning to read, knows she ought to read, in the
frame of each man the result of a whole history of all his life, of
what he is and what makes him so,--of all his fore-fathers, of what
they were and of what made them so. Each nerve has a sort of memory of
its past life, is trained or not trained, dulled or quickened, as the
case may be; each feature is shaped and characterised, or left loose
and meaningless, as may happen; each hand is marked with its trade and
life, subdued to what it works in;--IF WE COULD BUT SEE IT.

It may be answered that in this there is nothing new; that we always
knew how much a man's past modified a man's future; that we all knew
how much, a man is apt to be like his ancestors; that the existence of
national character is the greatest commonplace in the world; that when
a philosopher cannot account for anything in any other manner, he
boldly ascribes it to an occult quality in some race. But what physical
science does is, not to discover the hereditary element, but to render
it distinct,--to give us an accurate conception of what we may expect,
and a good account of the evidence by which we are led to expect it.
Le