THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE CYCLE 163 



bers. Now Robert Chambers had many shrewd ideas, 

 and one was that the lengthening out of the ante- 

 natal period in mammals had to do with the evolution 

 of fine brains, as in horse and elephant. It afforded 

 in man's case nine months during which his extraor- 

 dinarily complex nervous organisation (with its 9,200 

 millions of nerve-cells in the cerebral cortex alone) 

 could develop more or less sheltered from the great 

 booming, buzzing confusion of the world, from the 

 torrent of impressions that keeps us awake and con- 

 scious. We must remember that it is during the ante- 

 natal life that we get all our equipment of nerve-cells, 

 and though there are illustrious examples of children 

 born at seven months or so who grew up to a brilliant 

 career (e.g. the philosopher Hobbes), perhaps it is safe 

 to say that for the average the child who bides its time 

 is best. One half of the untimely children die in a few 

 hours, days, or months. 



(b) The second thing is that if we are to keep our 

 ideas clear, we must realise that ' nurture ' is playing 

 upon the developing human organism for all these 

 months before birth, and that it is not always easy 

 to be sure whether a peculiarity seen in the newly 

 born is a modification induced by some peculiarity in 

 the maternal nurture, or is an inborn variation arising 

 from some new arrangements before or during the fer- 

 tilisation of the egg-cell. In the first case it is not 

 likely to pass on to the grandchildren; in the second 

 case it has every chance of so doing. The deteriora- 

 tive effects of ante-natal alcohol absorption are well 



