SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL HEREDITY 289 



US that adult man, even structurally, is in some 

 degree the result of the environment which he has 

 created. More forcibly is this true in regard to his 

 intelligence. A large part of the mental character- 

 istics of adult man are due to his acquiring the use 

 of speech. How feeble would be our mental equip- 

 ment if we could not use language ! But the develop- 

 ment of the power of speech is simply a matter of 

 environment, due, not to the innate characters of 

 the individual, but to the environment in which he is 

 placed. The education of the brain during youth is 

 necessary for the production of an adult fitted for 

 our civilized communities. Every advance sees a 

 greater and greater appreciation of the necessity of 

 educating the individual, and every age sees the 

 number of years given to this education increasing. 

 But education is nothing more than grafting a large 

 number of acquired characters upon the plastic 

 innate attributes of man. Men have, of course, 

 mental powers which are organic and inherited. But 

 the use they can make of these mental powers 

 depends upon the tools they have to work with. By 

 tools we have here reference to language, the multi- 

 plication table, writing, printing — to education in 

 general ; in short, to social inheritance. Civilization, 

 we must remember, is due to the powers of the adults 

 that compose a community and not to the attributes 

 of children. Thus civilization is based upon the 

 acquirement on the part of each individual of a series 

 of characters not inherited in the ordinary sense 

 from previous generations but acquired anew by each 

 individual. 



Indeed, this phenomenon which we call civilization 

 is of a high grade only when the artificial becomes 



