THE MIND OF APES AND OF MAN 271 



have been earned — that individual savages belonging to 

 races showing very low mental accomplishments in their 

 native surroundings are yet capable of being " educated " 

 to a far higher level of mental performance, when 

 removed in early youth from their natural conditions 

 and subjected to the same conditions as the better-cared- 

 for children of a civilized race, than any of them ever 

 reach in their own communities. 



Very few really satisfactory experiments have been 



made in this direction, but the history of the negroes in 



America shows that the pure, unmixed negro brain is 



capable of showing high mathematical power, musical 



gifts of the best, and moral and philosophic activities equal 



to those of the best, or all but the exceptionally gifted, 



individuals of European race. It seems that the large 



educable brain gained by man in a relatively early 



period of his development from the ape has now 



entered on a new phase of importance. The pressure of 



natural selection no longer favours an increased educability 



(and therefore size) of brain, but the later progress of 



i man has depended on the actual administration by each 



' generation to its successors of an increasingly systematized 



. exercise of that brain ; in short, it has depended on 



education itself, and on the gigantic new possibilities of 



if education, which have followed from the development, 



first, of language, then of writing, and lastly of printing, 



:i together with the accompanying growth and development 



|| of social organization, the inter-communication of all 



races, and the carrying on, by means of the Great Record 



j — the written and printed documents of humanity — of 



:S the experience and knowledge of each passing generation 



I of men from them to the men of the present moment. 



Huxley agreed with Cuvier in the opinion that the 



