48 ANIMAL LIFE AND HUMAN PROGRESS 



in any scheme for the betterment of the human race. For 

 one thing it follows that many of the high hopes formed about 

 improvement of the race through education are doomed to 

 disappointment. Education cannot affect the germ-plasm ; 

 therefore its effects cannot be inherited. The process must 

 be begun again in each generation. 



Do not suppose, however, that the effects of education 

 are negligible or of small account. The normal human in- 

 dividual is susceptible of improvement up to the limits of his 

 inherited capacity. Through education, or the want of it, 

 he may become a good or a bad citizen. If a good citizen, 

 he can by precept and example hand on to his children what 

 he has learnt, and they in turn will be better citizens and 

 influence the generation that comes after. In this way a 

 body of law, tradition and habit is acquired and handed on. 

 It accumulates through spoken and written word, and has 

 been in the past and may continue to be in the future the 

 dominant factor in social improvement. 



Education can do more than this. It can so impress upon 

 individuals the universality and inevitableness of the natural 

 laws and sequences to which they, in common with the rest 

 of living nature, are subject, that they will strive to conform 

 their inclinations to these laws, and to aim at a permanent 

 and what I may call a germinal improvement of the race. 



But this is a thing not to be hoped for if zoology is held in 

 disdain, and the truths it teaches slighted or ignorantly 

 denied. 



I say " truths." It may be objected that all this story of 

 the germ-plasm and the non-inheritance of acquired characters 

 is nothing more than a theory ; that theories have come into 

 fashion, have been taken for truth, and then disproved again 

 and again. You may say that I have, in this lecture, called 

 into question the efficacy of Natural Selection, which every 

 zoologist, a few years ago, would have declared to be a 

 demonstrated law of Nature. 



But I venture to say that we now stand on much more 

 solid ground than we did those few years ago, and I will occupy 

 the few minutes left to me in trying to show how much better 



