THE LAWS OF DESCENT 105 



I shall now pass on from the development of the animal 

 body to the relation these same laws bear to the evolution of 

 mind and soul. Now just as in our birth many forms of our 

 past animal existence are again reproduced in our individual 

 life, so in our souls the past experiences of our previous ances- 

 tors are reproduced in our minds and thoughts, in proportion 

 as our individual mind or the mind of our particular family, 

 which is reproduced in our individual brain, is a reproduction 

 of theirs and thus produces similar fitness in ourselves for 

 those acts or arts in which they excelled. But we also find 

 that as we cease to use certain qualities, owing to the fact 

 that civilisation removes their necessity, they become 

 less strongly developed, and the races which have least ad- 

 vanced in evolution often retain qualities that their more 

 advanced brothers lose ; thus we find that some of the inferior 

 races have retained more of their animal propensities which 

 their more civilised neighbours have lost. For instance, the 

 Aetas or pigmy inhabitants of the Philippine Islands have 

 retained such a high power of smell that they are still able 

 to trace where a man walks by the smell of the ground over 

 which he has walked, and in some cases to recognise a man 

 by the smell left behind although he may have passed out of 

 sight. Whereas the sense of smell amongst more civilised 

 varieties of mankind has ceased to exist to the same degree 

 owing to his higher civilisation doing away with the necessity 

 for its use. 



But to return to the point now at issue, the mind of man is, 

 as I said, only a hereditary reproduction of the minds of his 

 ancestors ; thus if you are born with a mind that is a throw- 

 back to certain ancestors you will be able to recall under like 

 circumstances should they arise in your lifetime, the experi- 

 ences of such of your ancestors as have had similar experiences, 

 provided that they have had similar minds to your own ; that 

 is to say, from the time of your birth back to the life of the 

 earliest ancestor that you throw back to, but not to the experi- 

 ences of like ancestors previous to that ancestor, nor to any 

 ancestor of whose brain your own is not a reproduction, or of 

 whose soul yours is not a rebirth. I may here state that the 

 class of brain you may possess, or the class of memories that 

 you may recall, is not decided by the number of such ancestors, 

 nor by the minds of your parents, but by the actions that your 



