ii66 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



was driving at. Perhaps — as the Loeb edition and translation 

 suggests — there has never been a better biologist than Galen, but 

 the percentage of biologically-minded people to-day is enormously 

 greater than it was when Galen died, about a.d. 200. There is 

 probably — we write under correction — no poet living so great as 

 Homer; but our point is that the percentage of the poeticaUy- 

 minded has risen amazingly. Let us admit that we have no sure 

 knowledge of the percentage of minor poets, minor scientists, minor 

 philosophers, and minor artists in old days, Greek especially; and 

 let us also admit that part of what seems like widespread mentality 

 to-day is only superposed and mimetic veneer. But after we have 

 made these and other allowances we cannot rid ourselves of the 

 commonsense conviction that the average of culture has risen. 

 Humanity has made progress since the days of the primitive men 

 of whom i^ischylus gave such a vivid picture, living "like silly 

 ants, beneath the ground, in hollow caves unsunned". Compared 

 with Homo neanderthalensis , our ancient collateral in late glacial 

 times. Homo sapiens has made progress; but the question long 

 puzzled over is the nature of this advance. 



As we have already outlined, men worthy of the name emerged 

 gradually in the course of an evolutionary trend which began in 

 Tree-shrews and Tarsiers, and continued through Lemurs and Mar- 

 mosets, Monkeys and Apes, to tentative men. This trend was marked 

 by such improvements as the emancipation of the hand and the 

 elaboration of the voice; but it was especially concerned, as Elliot 

 Smith has shown, with an enlargement and a complexifying of a 

 cerebral area called the neopallium, characteristic of the higher 

 mammals. As has been already stated, it has to do with visualising, 

 attention, manipulation, learning, and the higher faculties generally. 

 For our present purpose it makes little difference whether we think 

 most of Mind-hxdlrv or Brain-mind., for the two aspects or realities 

 have evolved together. Homo represented, to begin with, a large 

 mutation either of the neopallium or of the mind, as one likes to 

 look at it; and there is no reason to doubt that smaller mutations 

 on the same line have been of frequent occurrence. We know them 

 to-day as "geniuses", men and women of original mental pattern at 

 a high power. Now it is possible that there has been a gradual 

 raising of the qualitative and quantitative average of human brains 

 during the last two thousand years, though no single individual 

 has surpassed (say) Eudoxus and Archimedes. Progress might have 

 been greater along this line if mankind had taken more eugenic 

 care of its geniuses, and had condescended to select a little more 

 consistently in favour of brains. Yet against the theory that man's 

 supposed mental improvement since the time of Prometheus has 

 depended on organic advances in cerebral complexity — we have 

 some 9,200,000,000 nerve-cells in our brain cortex — there is the 



