all are placed.  Hence, from the extension of infancy, through a period of long years, proceeds at last from the hearts which are subjected to its influence the noble thing which we call altruism:  love for others than ourselves and the other high spiritual instincts which are the crown of human nature.  The recognition of the extension of infancy as the source from which in our slow evolution comes the brightest thing in the universe belongs to our own time.  It is perhaps the climax of our philosophic speculation.  What more feeble than the snowflakes!  But accumulated and compressed they become the glacier which may carapace an entire zone and determine its configuration into mountain and valley.  What more feeble than the feebleness of the babe!  And yet that multiplied by the million through aeons of time and over continents of space fashions humanity after the sublime pattern shown on the Mount.  If to John Fiske belongs the credit of first recognising in the scheme of evolution the significance of this mighty factor, the extension of infancy (he himself so believed and I do not think it can be questioned that he was the first to recognise it), what philosophic thinker has to a greater extent laid the world in debt?  This I shall not further discuss.  I am touching in these papers only upon light and exterior things, nor am I competent to deal with philosophical problems and controversies.  John Fiske gave his strength to the writing of history, where, too, there are controversies into which I do not propose to enter.  I will only say that I resent the account of him which makes him to have been a mere populariser whose merit lies solely or for the most part in the fact that, while appropriating materials accumulated by others, he had only Goldsmith’s faculty of making them graceful and attractive to the mass of readers.  His philosophical instinct, on the other hand, discovered, as few writers have done, the subtle links through which in history facts are related to facts and are weighed wisely, in the protagonists, the motives and qualities which make them foremost figures.  He saw unerringly where emphasis should be put, what should be salient, what subordinate.  Too many writers, German especially, perhaps, have the fault of “writing a subject to its dregs,” giving to the unimportant undue place.  In Fiske’s estimation of facts there is no failure of proper proportion, the great thing is always in the foreground, the trifle in shadow or quite unnoticed.  To do this accurately is a fine power.  He delved more deeply himself perhaps than many of his critics have been willing to acknowledge, but I incline to say that his main service to history was in detecting with unusual insight the subtle relations of cause and effect, links which other and sometimes very able men failed adequately to recognise.  In a high sense he was indeed a populariser.  He wore upon himself like an ample garment a splendid erudition under which he moved, however, not at all oppressed or trammelled.  Much