in the tents of Shem, unalloyed with the dross of lower races, whose animalism has survived in the defects of other Aryan stocks that dwelt among them. But the very opposite seems to be the case. The more we study the Greek language, the more we are impressed with the number of strange roots, which point to a non-Aryan origin. Many of the words in commonest use, such as βασιλεὑς and τὑραννος, are not to be explained from Aryan roots, and anyone who has studied such place-names as Tiryns, Assos, and their congeners will fairly conclude that the Greeks were not purer from admixture than the Slavs or the Celts.[1] After all that has been adduced, therefore, to account for the intellectual supremacy of the Greeks, we are compelled to fall back on the ultimate fact--which has not been explained--that they possessed a national genius denied to their brethren and their neighbours. It is as yet an ultimate fact that the human race is not promoted, except in numbers, by heat and moisture. Some have been higher from the earliest moment that we can observe, or infer, their conditions. Others have remained lower in spite of the most favourable circumstances. This is a riddle which no historian has yet solved. But is it stranger, I ask, than the sporadic and unaccountable appearance, in a settled and known society, of individual genius? This is the parallel case wherewith I cannot explain, but only vindicate my position. Is it stranger that one nation should emerge into history with exceptional gifts than that there emerges into life, according to no law that we know, individual genius? If you look back at the family history of those that have made or upset empires, that have added new domains to science, that have created the poetry of the world, you will find no law or reason to explain their sporadic appearance, like that of brilliant meteors across the orderly stars of the sky. They generally come from undistinguished parents; they have undistinguished brothers and sisters; they do not transmit their great qualities, save in some rare occasions, as if to show that there is even here no prohibitive law. They may be single, or eldest, or youngest, children, or in the middle of a large family. They need not be noted for physical health. There was once a posthumous and yet prematurely born infant, so puny and wretched that, but for the sorrows of the widowed mother, little pains would have been taken to keep it alive, for it was her first born. Charitable neighbours nursed it with amazing care, and so saved its miserable spark of life from extinction. After a delicate and monotonous youth, the child went to Cambridge; he was known in later years as Sir Isaac Newton.