SOCIAL HEREDITY 271 



notion of counting, but in the two attempts to 

 grasp the nature of numbers, Gait on remarked, 

 " the comparison reflected no great honour on the 

 man." l 



That the members even of the highest civilized 

 race when without the artificial enumeration scale 

 inherited from civilization have no more natural 

 ability to count than the Damara whom Gait on 

 observed ; that the children of African aborigines, 

 and even the children of the aborigines of Australia, 

 learn when taught the same things quite as easily 

 and readily as the children of Europeans ; and that 

 the apparent difference which he noted between the 

 mental faculties of the advanced and less-advanced 

 races of the world was due to the nature of their social 

 inheritance and not to the nature of their inborn 

 faculties, were matters which were beyond the 

 horizon of Galton's mind at the time. 



The standpoint in these matters of men of Galton's 

 calibre was accepted widely throughout the edu- 

 cated world of the West. It was a firm belief at 

 the time among a certain type of Galton's fellow- 

 countrymen that the Englishman had a vast inborn 

 mental superiority over other peoples with which he 

 came in contact. Other nations held like beliefs 

 about themselves. Informed and cultured Russiaas 



1 Narrative cf an Explorer in Tropical South Africa. 



