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Crossing the sacred plain of Eleusis, our road entered the mountains lower offshoots of Cithæron, which divide the plain from that of Boeotia.... We climbed the main ridge of the mountains; and, in less than an hour, reached the highest point whence the great Boeotian plain suddenly opened upon our view.

The competition of races and species, observes Mr. Darwin, is always most severe between those which are most closely allied and which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature. Hence when the conditions of existence are modified the original stock runs great risk of being superseded by some one of its modified offshoots.

But on the other hand there are passages in which the rabbis oppose the Alexandrian attitude, and point out in its excessive philosophizing a danger to Judaism, so that in the end they exclude it. Rabbi Ishmael, we are told, warned his pupils of the danger of Greek wisdom. At the time when this spirit shows itself, the appearance of heretical offshoots from Judaism was already pronounced.

He had come by now into a vast cellar not very far from the Carlton Hotel itself. There were offshoots everywhere, passages more remote, the arches as of crypts, smaller apartments, odd corners which had guarded the casks five hundred years ago. Each of these could show you its little company safe harbored for the night; each had some face from which Master Timidity might well avert his eyes.

The mountains of the Dominican Republic may be grouped in five principal ranges, two along the northern coast, one in the center of the island, and two in the southwest. They all extend from east to west and present numerous offshoots, especially the central range which is the most important one and comprises the highest peaks.

In the ninth century, another Benedict revised the rule of the order, and made it more austere. Offshoots soon arose, as those of Clugni, A.D. 900; the Carthusians, A.D. 1084; the Cistercians, A.D. 1098.

But too often the egoism of the master weighed upon his disciples: and just as Bayreuth serves only monstrously to glorify one man, the offshoots of Bayreuth were little churches in which Mass was eternally sung in honor of the one God.

It is perhaps these very paradoxes which account for the puzzled fascination with which Stoicism affected the mind of antiquity, just as obscurity in a poet may prove a surer passport to fame than more strictly poetical merits. The root of Stoicism being a paradox, it is not surprising that the offshoots should be so too.

We now definitely know that the organic world on our earth has been as continuously developed, "in accordance with eternal iron laws," as Lyell had in 1830 shown to be the case for the inorganic frame of the earth itself; we know that the innumerable varieties of animals and plants which during the course of millions of years have peopled our planet are all simply branches of one single genealogical tree; we know that the human race itself forms only one of the newest, highest, and most perfect offshoots from the race of the Vertebrates.

Then I bethought me I would ascend some of these offshoots of the mountain, and take a quiet seat of observation from off one of the battlemental turrets which capped its many-towered heights, over all the subjected desert and lesser hills and rocks below.