275 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



they had no part. Theirs is merely to adapt. Man, on the other 

 hand, may assist in bringing about conditions amid which the next 

 generation will live. As adaptation is as much a human as an animal 

 characteristic, the importance of the environment becomes evident, 

 especially when we remember that in man no less than in the lower 

 animals those qualities are selected for survival that best fit the 

 conditions. Alfred Russel Wallace has given a splendid illustration 

 of this in his " Malay Archipelago." He wrote : 



There are now nearly five hundred people in Dobbo, of various races, all met 

 in this remote corner of the east, as they express it, " to look for their fortune," 

 to get money any way they can. They are most of them people who have the 

 very worst reputation for honesty, as well as every other form of morality — ■ 

 Chinese, Bugis, Ceramese, and half-caste Javanese, with a sprinkling of half- 

 wild Papuans from Timor, Babber and other islands — yet all goes as yet very 

 quietly. This motley, ignorant, blood-thirsty, thievish population live here 

 without the shadow of a government, with no police, no court and no lawyers; 

 yet they do not cut each other's throats, do not plunder each other night and 

 day, do not fall into the anarchy such a state of things might be supposed to 

 lead to. It is very extraordinary ! . . . Trade is the magic that keeps all at 

 peace and unites these discordant elements into a well-behaved community. 17 



The power to modify environment gives man possibilities not pos- 

 sessed by any of the other animals, but it adds vastly to his social 

 responsibility in education. The environment is put upon the lower 

 animals as it were from overhead, and they are left no choice but 

 adaptation or extinction, but man may make his own environment, 

 and in this way break a trail for progress. 



The difficulty in applying the principle of natural selection to 

 education is that we do not intelligently determine who are the fittest. 

 In nature the conditions demanding adaptation are comparatively 

 simple and definite. This is true also of primitive man, and, indeed, 

 quite largely of early civilized society. But the enormous enlargement 

 of human interests dims our vision. In one respect the lower animals 

 nave the advantage of us in their instinctive educational methods. 

 'Their teachers are never troubled by doubts concerning the ability of 

 their pupils. All receive equally careful training for life. They 

 do not prejudice the future of any by an adverse verdict so early in 

 life that the best in them may not yet have appeared. They train all 

 in the best way for success, which in their case means survival, and 

 then leave the final decision to natural selection. The conclusion of 

 one of England's foremost statisticians that the senior wrangler has 

 twenty-five times the innate ability of the lowest on the honor list, 

 because in one year the former obtained 7,500 credits to 300 of the 

 latter, is one of the humorous results of the so-called scientific method 

 of investigation. Against the hallucination of such measurements 

 let us remember that Darwin's father prognosticated that he would 

 disgrace his family because he cared for nothing but shooting, rat- 

 17 hoc. cit., p. 443. 



