For instance, we have been brought up to believe that there is no possible future for Spain; it is a dying nation, a senile individual, a people of degenerates; it has had its day, which can never return. The historian explains this by the false analogy between a race and an individual, and by the false Lamarckian theory of heredity. To these the biologist retorts with comments upon their falsity, and with the conviction that since Spain, even allowing for the anti-eugenic labours of the Inquisition, has not been subjected to the only process which can ensure real degeneration--viz., the consistent and stringent selection of the worst--she is yet capable of regeneration. Regeneration is not really the word, because there has been little real degeneration, but only the successive deterioration of successive and undegenerate generations. If we took an animal species that _has_ degenerated, such as the intestinal parasites, and endeavoured to regenerate them, we should begin to realise the magnitude of our task. That is not the task for Spain, the biologist asserts. Merely the environment must be altered,--not the mountain ranges and the rivers, Buckle notwithstanding, but the really potent factors in the environment, the spiritual and psychical and social factors--and the deterioration of each new generation, inherently undegenerate, will cease. I am using these opposed terms with great care and of set purpose. And the biologist is right. The facts concerning which so many historians have shaken their heads, and upon which they have based so many moralisings and theories of history, the facts which they have cited in support of their false analogies and misconceptions of heredity--due, of course, to the errors of former biology--turn out to be not facts at all, or, at any rate, only facts of the moment. The “dying nation,” as Lord Salisbury called it, has occasion to alter its psychical environment. It introduces the practice of education; it begins to shake off the yoke of ecclesiasticism; and what are the consequences? The new generation is found to be potentially little worse and little better than its predecessors of the sixteenth century. There has been no national or racial degeneration. The environment is modified for the better, _i.e._, so as to choose the better, and Spain, as they say in misleading phrase, “takes on a new lease of life.” The historian of the present day, knowing as a historian what qualities of blood have been in the Spanish people, and basing his theories upon sound biology, must confidently assert that that blood, incapable, as he knows, of degeneration by any Lamarckian process, may still retain its ancient quality and will yet make history.