of the muddy—­an attempt to apologise for, and organise into a system, all the nature-dreading superstitions of the Roman world.  Porphyry, Plotinus, Proclus, poor Hypatia herself, and all her school—­they may have had themselves no bodily fear of Nature; for they were noble souls.  Yet they spent their time in justifying those who had; in apologising for the superstitions of the very mob which they despised:  just as—­it sometimes seems to me—­some folk in these days are like to end in doing; begging that the masses might be allowed to believe in anything, however false, lest they should believe in nothing at all:  as if believing in lies could do anything but harm to any human being.  And so died the science of the old world, in a true second childhood, just where it began.

The Jewish sages, I hold, taught that science was probable; the Greeks and Romans proved that it was possible.  It remained for our race, under the teaching of both, to bring science into act and fact.

Many causes contributed to give them this power.  They were a personally courageous race.  This earth has yet seen no braver men than the forefathers of Christian Europe, whether Scandinavian or Teuton, Angle or Frank.  They were a practical hard-headed race, with a strong appreciation of facts, and a strong determination to act on them.  Their laws, their society, their commerce, their colonisation, their migrations by land and sea, proved that they were such.  They were favoured, moreover, by circumstances, or—­as I should rather put it—­by that divine Providence which determined their times, and the bounds of their habitation.  They came in as the heritors of the decaying civilisation of Greece and Rome; they colonised territories which gave to man special fair play, but no more, in the struggle for existence, the battle with the powers of Nature; tolerably fertile, tolerably temperate; with boundless means of water communication; freer than most parts of the world from those terrible natural phenomena, like the earthquake and the hurricane, before which man lies helpless and astounded, a child beneath the foot of a giant.  Nature was to them not so inhospitable as to starve their brains and limbs, as it has done for the Esquimaux or Fuegian; and not so bountiful as to crush them by its very luxuriance, as it has crushed the savages of the tropics.  They saw enough of its strength to respect it; not enough to cower before it:  and they and it have fought it out; and it seems to me, standing either on London Bridge or on a Holland fen-dyke, that they are winning at last.