5584 Reason and Instinct. 



intellectual condition and adaptability of the children of different dis- 

 tricts ; and I believe that I am not at all singular in thinking that I 

 could trace out the reason thus : wherever the class of parents were, 

 generally speaking, unintelligent, with minds in a state of immobility 

 and apathy, — whether from the want of teaching when themselves 

 were children, or from other and more physical causes, — then the 

 children were slow, heavy and dull of apprehension, as well as more 

 difficult to train and discipline. On the contrary, when the parents 

 were intelligent and acute, and in favourable circumstances as to self- 

 support and self-respect, and although they might be mainly ill- 

 educated or very little educated, still the children were apt, quick, 

 intelligent and easily taught. 



Nor do I think there is anything extravagant or unreasonable in 

 such a theory. For we have but to observe what is the notorious 

 result of no teaching or training at all, or of teaching and training in a 

 downward direction, to become aware what a disastrous shipwreck is 

 made of all the better and nobler attributes of man. Follow the de- 

 praved and hardened offender into his dens and hidden places of 

 resort, and you see him a brute in almost all, articulate speech and his 

 hand only excepted. Much as the brute lives, lives he; with the 

 same — nay, worse than the same — instinctive lustings after meat and 

 drink ; with the same unconcern as to the concealment of what among 

 the least civilized races of man, if uncorrupted, nature itself is said to 

 wish to hide ; with the same passions and desires as animate the beast 

 of prey ; and with only much the same acumination of intellect as 

 might distinguish a lion or tiger that had graduated, a " first-class" 

 brute, at some Oxford or Cambridge, the Alma ffj Mater of the 

 youthful Felidse. 



Go again, and look at the outcasts of a tribe or people, the Diggers, 

 for instance, the Bushmen and such of the Australian natives as are 

 yet known to us. But I will content myself with an account of the 

 habits of the Bushmen, derived from Dr. Prichard's book: — "Of all 

 species of men, this race, approaching as it does in its form most 

 nearly to the second genus of bimanous animals, is still more closely 

 allied to the orangs through the inferiority of its intellectual faculties. 

 Happily for themselves, these people are so stupid, lazy and brutish 

 that the idea of reducing them to slavery has been abandoned. 

 Scarcely are they able to carry on any train of reasoning, and their 

 language, as bare as their ideas are scanty, recedes into a kind of 

 murmuring, which bears scarcely any resemblance to the human voice. 

 Of habits so filthy as to render them infectious, always moist with 



