182 ORGANIC EVOLUTION — MENTAL 



the environment in which the Engh"sh have evolved 

 has so differed from the environments in which the 

 French, the Italians, the Germans, and the West 

 Africans have evolved, that survival of the fittest, in the 

 case of the Englishman, has caused in them a greater 

 evolution of the nervous structures which subsen'e 

 resolution than it has caused in the other nations named ; 

 it can hardly be that the Frenchman is inherently vain 

 because the environment of his ancestry was such that 

 superior vanity caused a greater survival or a lesser 

 elimination than it caused in the other nations ; there 

 is no conceivable reason why phlegm in Germanic sur- 

 roundings should have conduced to survival more than 

 in West African surroundings ; or why cruelty should 

 have been more beneficial or less deleterious to the 

 ancestors of the West Africans than it was to the 

 ancestors of the Germans. 



We must suppose, therefore, that differences in the 

 sizes and shapes of the brains of various races imply, 

 not differences in inborn mental traits, but differences 

 in the power of acquiring traits ; we must conclude that 

 the African Bushman, with his small brain, differs 

 mentally from the Englishman with his large brain, not 

 mainly in inborn mental traits, but mainly in the traits 

 which he acquires, and in Ms powers of acquiring them. 

 Reasoning from the analogy of lower animals, it is cfertain 

 that the man with the smaller and less developed brain 

 differs inherently from the man with the larger and 

 better developed brain, mainly in that he has a 

 smaller power of developing in response to stimulation, 

 a lesser power of acquiring fit mental traits, not mainly 

 in that he has different inborn mental traits, for 

 these latter {i. e. instincts), as I say, have been so re- 

 placed and overshadowed in man by acquired mental 

 traits, that they have undei'gone great retrogression, 

 and except as regards certain instincts, common to all 



