Biological Analogies in History: The Romanes Lecture 1910
9781465684790
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
An American who, in response to such an invitation as I have received, speaks in this university of ancient renown, cannot but feel with peculiar vividness the interest and charm of his surroundings, fraught as they are with a thousand associations. Your great universities, and all the memories that make them great, are living realities in the minds of scores of thousands of men who have never seen them and who dwell across the seas in other lands. Moreover, these associations are no stronger in the men of English stock than in those who are not. My people have been for eight generations in America; but in one thing I am like the Americans of to morrow, rather than like many of the Americans of to day; for I have in my veins the blood of men who came from many different European races. The ethnic make up of our people is slowly changing so that constantly the race tends to become more and more akin to that of those Americans who like myself are of the old stock but not mainly of English stock. Yet I think that, as time goes by, mutual respect, understanding, and sympathy among the English speaking peoples grow greater and not less. Any of my ancestors, Holland or Huguenot, Scotchman or Irishman, who had come to Oxford in ‘the spacious days of great Elizabeth,’ would have felt far more alien than I, their descendant, now feel. Common heirship in the things of the spirit makes a closer bond than common heirship in the things of the body. More than ever before in the world’s history we of to day seek to penetrate the causes of the mysteries that surround not only mankind but all life, both in the present and the past. We search, we peer, we see things dimly; here and there we get a ray of clear vision, as we look before and after. We study the tremendous procession of the ages, from the immemorial past when in ‘cramp elf and saurian forms’ the creative forces ‘swathed their too much power,’ down to the yesterday, a few score thousand years distant only, when the history of man became the overwhelming fact in the history of life on this planet; and studying, we see strange analogies in the phenomena of life and death, of birth, growth, and change, between those physical groups of animal life which we designate as species, forms, races, and the highly complex and composite entities which rise before our minds when we speak of nations and civilizations.
