800 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



quality in our boys. As one of the inevitable accompaniments of the 

 savage state, we should expect to find heartlessness among children. 

 " There can be no doubt," says Sir John Lubbock, perhaps the highest 

 authority on the subject of the qualities of barbarians "there can be 

 no doubt that, as an almost universal rule, savages are cruel." Their 

 moral code permits, if it does not inculcate, revenge and murder ; and 

 no stigma whatever is attached to a deed so unnatural to our eyes as 

 maternal infanticide. The stories of inhumanity with which modern 

 travelers fill their volumes, if true of the savages of to-day, will serve 

 to characterize the savages of the past ; and there is no fact better 

 established than that the savages of times gone by numbered among 

 themselves our own ancestors. During countless thousands of years, 

 from the unknown date when the Miocene drifts covered the valleys 

 of Western Europe, and buried the war-axes of the inhabitants who 

 hunted beasts and men through the forest, to a time which, in com- 

 parison with that date, is as near as yesterday, the ancestors of the 

 present civilized races roamed about as hungry, ill-clad savages. Their 

 daily need of food was supplied by means of the suffering they inflicted 

 upon cave-bears and musk-oxen, and sometimes they slew and ate their 

 fellow-men, and cleft their bones for marrow. The shedding of blood, 

 as the almost inseparable accompaniment of the satisfaction of the 

 most imperious of all desires, hunger, must have become, according 

 to the well-known principle of the association of ideas, in itself a pleas- 

 ure. Like the savages of to-day, those fierce progenitors of ours must 

 have delighted in the torture of captured enemies. Thus, during long 

 ages, compassion was unknown, and it appears to have been lately 

 acquired by the now dominant races. Indeed, even among so highly 

 cultivated a people as the Romans, it remained almost unknown until 

 comparatively recent times say fifteen hundred years ago in proof 

 of which may be noted their heartless fondness for the bloody sports 

 of the arena. 



The emotion of pity, then, appeared late in the history of the race ; 

 and, in view of the law of our development, which carries us along 

 the path our ancestors have trod, how can we expect our boys to be 

 anything else but cruel ? How far is it judicious to go, in trying to 

 alter the natural course of a child's mental growth by imposing upon 

 him ideas which in due course he will not share until later ? This last 

 question is inviting, but we will not go into its solution at present, 

 contenting ourselves with observing that because a boy shows no com- 

 punction at giving pain to a captive bird, or calmly lacerates the feel- 

 ings of a family of squirrels, merely to give himself a few soon-neglected 

 pets, is no reason for expecting him to grow up a monster of cruelty. 

 And we will further venture to suggest that much of the immorality 

 of boys is a necessary consequence of their descent, as a corollary of 

 which follows the aphorism of my witty friend, "A good boy is dis- 

 eased." 



