BASIS OF INVESTIGATION. 79 



many diverse circumstances; then, in our hypothetical community 

 this older man will immediately become the most prominent man 

 there. He will know better than any one else what to do and how 

 to do it. He will be the arbitrator in disputes and probably will 

 become the Justice of the Peace or the first Mayor of the embryo 

 town. All this will be because his years have developed his brain 

 so that it has a greater functional capacity than the brains of his 

 associates. According to the theory of use-inheritance this man 

 could, from a given mother, beget a more intelligent son than could 

 any other man in the hypothetical community. If the son of such 

 a man should become eminent, we would have an illustration of the 

 ordinary saying that eminent men are the sons of prominent men. 

 But saying that an eminent man is the son of a prominent man is 

 only another way of saying that he is the son of an educated man, 

 because a man is prominent only because of the education he has 

 acquired. 



PROMINENCE DEFINED. 



A prominent man is one whose brain has great functional capac- 

 ity. While absorbing facts is a function of the brain, it is not the 

 particular function which produces prominence. That function is 

 the power of using known facts and previous experience in the solu- 

 tion of any problem that may arise, and is usually designated by the 

 words judgment, discretion, and intelligence. 



The relative development of the body and the brain is illus- 

 trated diagrammatically in Fig. 3, in which the line A represents the 

 bodily development, B the development of the brain, and C the 

 development of the man as a whole. If we assume that these lines 

 represent the normal development of a healthy man, then the theory 

 of use-inheritance would say that his child with the best physical 



