THE MIND OF APES AND OF MAN 271 



have been carried — that individual savages belonging to 

 races showing very low mental accomplishments in their 

 native surroundings are yet capable of being " educated " 

 to a far higher level of mental performance, when 

 removed in early youth from their natural conditions 

 and subjected to the same conditions as the better-cared- 

 for children of a civilized race, than any of them ever 

 reach in their own communities. 



Very few really satisfactory experiments have been 

 made in this direction, but the history of the negroes in 

 America shows that the pure, unmixed negro brain is 

 capable of showing high mathematical power, musical 

 gifts of the best, and moral and philosophic activities equal 

 to those of the best, or all but the exceptionally gifted, 

 individuals of European race. It seems that the large 

 educable brain gained by man in a relatively early 

 period of his development from the ape has now 

 entered on a new phase of importance. The pressure of 

 natural selection no longer favours an increased educability 

 (and therefore size) of brain, but the later progress of 

 man has depended on the actual administration by each 

 generation to its successors of an increasingly systematized 

 exercise of that brain ; in short, it has depended on 

 education itself, and on the gigantic new possibilities of 

 education, which have followed from the development, 

 first, of language, then of writing, and lastly of printing, 

 together with the accompanying growth and development 

 of social organization, the inter-communication of all 

 races, and the carrying on, by means of the Great Record 

 — the written and printed documents of humanity — of 

 the experience and knowledge of each passing generation 

 of men from them to the men of the present moment. 



Huxley agreed with Cuvier in the opinion that the 



