United States or Turkey ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Cousins of England, we feel inclined to say, remember that there is nothing so hard to bear as contempt; that there may be patriotism where there are no pedigrees; that family-trees are not the best timber for a frame of government; that truth is no less true because it is spoken through the nose; and that there may be devotion to great principles and national duties among men who have not the air of good society, nay, that, in the long run, good society itself is found to consist, not of Grammonts and Chesterfields, but of the men who have been loyal to conviction and duty, and who have had more faith in ideas than in Vanity Fair.
The conclusions of Steinmann, that are most important for us, may be summarized as follows: 1. The family and transition forms demanded from palaeontology by Darwinism for its family-trees, constructed not empirically but a priori, are nowhere to be found among the abundant materials which palaeontological investigation has already produced.
Now the Archdeacon was no snob; he believed in men and women who had long and elaborate family-trees simply because he believed in institutions and because it had always seemed to him a quite obvious fact that the longer any one or anything remained in a place the more chance there was of things being done as they always had been done.
If he who makes a tree to grow where none grew before, is a public benefactor, surely she who has made it possible for many family-trees to grow and thrive, yielding their fragrance and their fruit in a pure home and social life, is a benefactress in the highest sense. Let us encourage on every side the transformation of filthy, neglected tenements into "Good Luck" houses.
The Pilgrim Fathers figure in American pedigrees almost as frequently and persistently as Norman William and his followers appear at the trunk of our family-trees. Certainly, the Mayflower must have carried very many heads of houses across the Atlantic.
Indeed, family-trees were constructed without regard for palaeontology, almost exclusively from an examination of present conditions, and sometimes the author did not even shrink from falsification.
Word Of The Day