, 



The Psychological Consequences of Heredity. 327 



heart with wonderful rapidity ; but cannot use 'thpir 

 faculties. ' In childhood,' says Sir Samuel Baker, f tlje yourfg ' j 

 negro is more advanced than the white of the same age, 'but his 

 mind does not bear the fruit of which it gave promise/ ' In Ne/tf 

 Zealand,' says Thompson, ' children of ten years are more intel-/ 

 ligent than English children ; still, very few New Zealanders are 

 capable of receiving, in their higher faculties, a culture equal to 

 that of the English.' One of the reasons given in the United 

 States for not educating negro children with the whites is, that 

 after a certain age their progress does not correspond ; the intel- 

 ligence of the negro appearing to be incapable of going beyond a 

 certain point. Now if these facts are not to be attributed to an 

 incurable defect of the nature, we have here an argument in favour 

 of heredity. These savage minds are, as it were, uncultivated 

 lands, which can only be broken up by the continuous toil of 

 generations. Hence it is that in India the children of Brahmins, 

 sprung from a class that has long been cultivated, display intel- 

 ligence, insight, docility; while, according to the experience of 

 missionaries, children of the other castes are considerably their 

 inferiors in these respects. Again, a nation cannot with impunity 

 be robbed of the most intelligent and the bravest of its population, 

 for that is a selection in the wrong way, and its consequences are 

 deplorable. 'By martyrdom and imprisonment/ says Galton, 

 'the Spanish nation was drained of free-thinkers at the rate of 

 1,000 persons annually, for the three centuries between 1481 and 

 1781 ; an average of 100 persons having been executed and 900 

 imprisoned every year during that period. The actual data during 

 those 300 years were 32,000 burnt, 17,000 persons burnt in effigy 

 (I presume they mostly died in prison or escaped from Spain), 

 and 291,000 condemned to various terms of imprisonment and 

 other penalties. It is impossible that any nation could stand a 

 policy like this without paying a heavy penalty in the deterioration 

 of its breed, as has notably been the result in the superstitious, 

 unintelligent Spanish race of the present day.' 



Not to accumulate further examples, we may now conclude 



with the remarkable words of Herbert Spencer, which sum up the 



intellectual consequences of heredity no less than its organic 



conditions : ' The human brain is an organized register of infinitely 



15 



