daughters avoided, in their laudable efforts to mate themselves suitably. These were—blood relations, soldiers, and noblemen. Not, certainly, that these were worse than other people. But the first involved deterioration of breed, while the others were exposed, in perhaps most instances, to a comparatively unemployed or idling life—a condition which was not favourable either to married happiness or to life's highest or best enjoyment.
Electricity was, as I have said. Black's great hobby. He had a notable theory on the subject, which was entirely his own, as he constantly and proudly assured us; and this was to the effect, that by crossing the electric current, in ways hereafter to be discovered, we should enormously increase the power and quality of the work done by the electric agency. We might some day be able to cross and re-cross and cross yet again, with ever-increasing powers, until our dynamics could send us on the wings of light itself over space, and our chemistry could synthesise, as he learnedly worded it, all the organic as well as the inorganic world, and turn out for us, from the laboratory, a savoury beef-steak as readily as an acid or an alkali.
Our social condition, said Yellowly, was in a course of quiet but really rapid change, and in a direction inevitably democratic. He explained, in accordance,
