i895. NOTES AND COMMENTS. 233 



Speaking from his own experience of Egyptians, he declares that the 

 attempt to teach them reading and writing, which for us seem the 

 beginning of all education, turns them into useless idiots. They 

 cannot make use of such accomplishments, which are utterly 

 incongruous with the past conditions of their race, and this erroneous 

 so-called education prevents the development in them of the " great 

 essentials of a valuable character — moderation, justice, sympathy, 

 politeness and consideration, quick observation, shrewdness, ability 

 to plan and pre-arrange, a keen sense of the uses and properties of 

 things." It is quite otherwise with the Copts, whose ancestors have 

 been scribes for hundreds of generations. 



This particular instance is one of the most general application. 

 It is necessary that the rulers of foreign races should understand that 

 the civilisation of these Western islands in the nineteenth century 

 is but one among many civilisations, or statical conditions of society. 

 From the Andaman islanders to the Parsees each community of men 

 has its own standards and traditions crystalhsed into a code that is 

 stamped upon their brains. He urges that those who are being 

 trained to be rulers of foreign races should be made to study other 

 civilisations, if only in anthropological museums and in translations 

 of literatures. Formerly, when classical education was supreme, 

 every educated young man had, in addition to his own habit of 

 civilisation, a knowledge of the kind of ideas of Greeks and Romans, 

 and from the Old Testament of polygamous and patriarchal peoples. 

 Now, other subjects of study — perhaps more valuable in other ways, 

 are usurping the place of the older studies, and young men are going 

 out to become Satraps, who may be experts in the mathematics, in 

 the sciences, or in modern languages, but who regard the customs 

 and religions of other races from the narrow outlook of the civilisation 

 of Bayswater, the religion of a rural parish, or of a Presbyterian 

 household. 



We hope that Professor Flinders Petrie's weighty advice, which 

 we have roughly paraphrased, will receive due attention. 



Weismann and Spencer. 



In the Contemporary Revieiv for September Professor Weismann, 

 after a considerable lapse of time, returns again to the controversy in 

 which Mr. Herbert Spencer engaged him. We have no space to 

 enter into the laborious details of the controversy, and, to be frank, 

 the disputants seem to us to have abandoned empirical arguments for 

 the arid regions of speculative metaphysic. But those who have 

 bravely followed the controversy, not only in the essays of the main 

 disputants, but in the innumerable writings of others, must be familiar 

 with attempts to ridicule Weismann because he has set forward his 

 theoretical construction of the germ-plasm as a real thing. He 

 himself, with a reiterated modesty, has offered it merely as a working 



