THE RECIPE FOR GENIUS 333 



Spontaneously into ^reat commanders in the second genera- 

 tion. True, there are numerous cases such as that of the 

 Hcrschels, father and son, or the two Scahgers, or the 

 Caracci, or the Pitts, or the Scipios, and a dozen more, 

 where the genius, once developed, has persisted for two 

 or three, or even four lives : but these instances really cast 

 no light at all upon our central problem, which is just this 

 — How does tlie genius come in the first place to be de- 

 veloped at all from parents in whom individually no par- 

 ticular genius is ultimately to be seen ? 



Suppose we take, to start with, a race of hunting savages 

 in the earliest, lowest, and most undifferentiated stage, we 

 shall get really next to no personal peculiarities or idio- 

 syncrasies of any sort amongst them. Every one of them 

 will be a good hunter, a good fisherman, a good scalper and 

 a good manufacturer of bows and arrows. Division of 

 labour, and the other troublesome technicalities of our 

 modern political economy, are as unknown among such 

 folk as the modern nuisance of dressing for dinner. Each 

 man performs all the functions of a citizen on his own 

 account, because there is nobody else to perform them for 

 him — the medium of exchange known as hard cash has 

 not, so far as he is concerned, yet been invented ; and he 

 performs them well, such as they are, because he inherits 

 from all his ancestors aptitudes of brain and muscle in 

 these directions, owing to the simple fact that those among 

 his collateral predecessors who didn't know how to snare a 

 bird, or were hopelessly stupid in the art of chipping flint 

 arrowheads, died out of starvation, leaving no representa- 

 tives. The beneficent institution of the poor law does not 

 exist among savages, in order to enable the lielpless and 

 incompetent to bring up families in their own image. 

 There, survival of the fittest still works out its own ulti- 

 mately benevolent and useful end in its own directly cruel 



