at least to explain the sex of the embryo being? He had written a very
curious paper crammed full of facts on this subject, but which left it
in the end in the complete ignorance in which the most exhaustive
researches had left it. Doubtless the question of heredity fascinated
him as it did only because it remained obscure, vast, and
unfathomable, like all the infant sciences where imagination holds
sway. Finally, a long study which he had made on the heredity of
phthisis revived in him the wavering faith of the healer, arousing in
him the noble and wild hope of regenerating humanity.

In short, Dr. Pascal had only one belief--the belief in life. Life was
the only divine manifestation. Life was God, the grand motor, the soul
of the universe. And life had no other instrument than heredity;
heredity made the world; so that if its laws could be known and
directed, the world could be made to one's will. In him, to whom
sickness, suffering, and death had been a familiar sight, the militant
pity of the physician awoke. Ah! to have no more sickness, no more
suffering, as little death as possible! His dream ended in this
thought--that universal happiness, the future community of perfection
and of felicity, could be hastened by intervention, by giving health
to all. When all should be healthy, strong, and intelligent, there
would be only a superior race, infinitely wise and happy. In India,
was not a Brahmin developed from a Soudra in seven generations, thus
raising, experimentally, the lowest of beings to the highest type of
humanity? And as in his study of consumption he had arrived at the
conclusion that it was not hereditary, but that every child of a
consumptive carried within him a degenerate soil in which consumption
developed with extraordinary facility at the slightest contagion, he
had come to think only of invigorating this soil impoverished by
heredity; to give it the strength to resist the parasites, or rather