THE MEANING OF INFANCY 



outang and gorilla are for this reason dreaded 

 by other animals, and roam the undisputed lords 

 of their native forests. They have probably ap- 

 proached the critical point where variations in 

 intelligence, always important, have come to be 

 supremely important, so as to be seized by natu- 

 ral selection in preference to variations in phys- 

 ical constitution. At some remote epoch of the 

 past we cannot say just when or how our 

 half-human forefathers reached and passed this 

 critical point, and forthwith their varied strug- 

 gles began age after age to result in the preser- 

 vation of bigger and better brains, while the rest 

 of their bodies changed but little. This partic- 

 ular work of natural selection must have gone 

 on for an enormous length of time, and as its 

 result we see that while man remains anatomi- 

 cally much like an ape, he has acquired a vastly 

 greater brain with all that this implies. Zoolo- 

 gically the distance is small between man and 

 the chimpanzee ; psychologically it has become 

 so great as to be immeasurable. 



But this steady increase of intelligence, as our 

 forefathers began to become human, carried with 

 it a steady prolongation of infancy. As mental 

 life became more complex and various, as the 

 things to be learned kept ever multiplying, less 

 and less could be done before birth, more and 

 more must be left to be done in the earlier years 

 of life. So instead of being born with a few sim- 

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