42 SOCIAL HEREDITY AND SOCIAL EVOLUTION 



heredity that govern the rest of the animal kingdom. 

 Perhaps a fairer statement would be, since manifestly 

 he has not freed himself from the ordinary laws of 

 germinal inheritance, that man has created for him- 

 self a wholly new series of laws and forces which, 

 in large measure, nullify the older laws of heredity. 

 Humanity, civilization, social evolution, call it what 

 we will, has not developed by the same laws that have 

 produced organic evolution elsewhere. If this is 

 true, we shall have to change front and turn our at- 

 tention in other directions. It will not be by the 

 study of the laws of organic heredity that we can 

 solve the problems of human evolution, but by the 

 study of that class of characters that we have been 

 calling acquired characters. These, which it has been 

 the custom of the last few years to throw aside as 

 of no significance, assume new and profound mean- 

 ing. Acquired characters may not have been of 

 much, if any, importance in bringing about the evo- 

 lution of animals, but they may still constitute the 

 factors upon which human evolution has been built. 

 It would not, then, be wholly or chiefly by the control 

 of the matings of individuals that we should try to 

 control the future, but in large part by the control 

 of environment. 



Before we can intelligently apply to the problem 

 of human social evolution the principles thus briefly 

 outlined we must get clearly before us the salient 

 features of that evolution. Instead of continuing 

 here a further consideration of social heredity we 

 will next make a brief study of the history of the 

 origin and development of human society. In this 

 outline we shall have two purposes. The first will 

 be to get a picture of the evolution of civilization 



