whilst it still kept open a path for retrogression. To shut out this possibility of re-descent into the beast would be one of the greatest services to their race. As useful for their advance would the command of human propagation be in another direction. The only fear of deterioration that still haunted them arose from atavism. Nature had still a trick of returning on her own footsteps. The child of the noblest pair had at times traces of far-back ancestry resurgent in evil or retrogressive traits; and it wasted the time and the best energy of parents and proparents to obliterate these. In every germ lay dormant the potentialities of its whole ancestral past; and any one of them might assert itself as master during the dim unguided life of gestation. With all their precautions something evil might still lurk in the systems of the young to be developed in full maturity of life. But if they moulded every tissue and organ and faculty for themselves, this retrogressive tendency that nature treasures up in every germ and child would disappear. There would be nothing to watch or obliterate in the immature. A still greater economy of time and labour would result in the abridgment of the earlier processes of education. Education, it is true, never ceased throughout life. But the education of the mature was self-conducted; the citizen was his own schoolmaster, and his surroundings were his instruments and assistants. That of the earlier stages used up the labour and wisdom of two other personalities for the long period of discipline; they were ever on watch and guard lest the past that lay in the youthful nature should suddenly rise and master it. For all education is a wrestle with the superseded past, which becomes evil as soon as it grows superfluous or obstructs further advance. Every form of vitality that has played its part on the stage of existence leaves it with reluctance; it clings to the new, that it may have a little more of life, and impedes its advance. The obsolete most survives in the tissues of the young and immature; and to educate is to struggle with the obsolete or obsolescent. The labour and thought needed to make the struggle end in the success of the new and progressive have never been understood so well by any as by the elders of the Limanorans. No effort of their civilisation was so exhausting as the educative. To enter on parenthood or proparenthood made them pause, for all acknowledged that the assumption of this duty was the greatest sacrifice a man or woman could make for the progress of the race. They knew that for half a century their individual vigilance could never cease, and that the strain would come on all their faculties, and not on one or two alone, as it would in most of the other duties they owed to the race, even invention or discovery. Whatsoever would commute or abolish this heavy service to the nation was sure to be welcomed. So vast an amount of the best time and wisest ability of the island would