460 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



to advance independently of heredity." Contrast man and other ani- 

 mals. The animal carries over from his parents and from his racial 

 stock the physical equipment and the functional tendencies which en- 

 able him to fight the battle of life precisely as his ancestors fought it. 

 If his type varies under natural conditions, it varies so slowly that, as a 

 rule, many generations are required to disclose the change. With man 

 all this is different. As I just now observed, nurture is cumulative. 

 Each succeeding generation takes up its heritage, not where the pre- 

 ceding generation began, but where it left off. Each has to advance by 

 first absorbing the new attainments of its immediate ancestors. In a 

 real sense, therefore, because he has language and books and institutions 

 and traditions, man is 



the heir of all the ages. 



Notice, however, that man comes into his social heritage only by 

 acquisition during his individual life, by his own individual efforts. Is 

 he, now, as a conscious being, better and better endowed as time goes 

 on for the process of absorption? Does talent grow as knowledge 

 grows? Does mental capacity keep pace with social accumulation? 

 May we not suppose that the men and women of some distant glacial 

 age, who dwelt upon the ice, wore the skin of the seal, and ate raw fisb, 

 had as much brain and as generous a measure of talent as have their 

 remote deseendents who wear sealskins, and eat ices and caviare ? We 

 can not say that they had not. On the contrary, our records, so far as 

 they go, indicate that the social heritage has outstripped the hereditary 

 growth of mind — that, as regards mental endowment, we begin very 

 much as our distant forbears began ; only, we proceed at once to burden 

 ourselves with information and obligation which for them did not exist. 

 To compass languages and sciences and histories and arts, and a com- 

 plicated social and political regime, we are supplied with virtually the 

 same minds that primitive man used for his primitive wants. Is it any 

 wonder, then, that education is the central problem of an advanced 

 civilization ? 



The question has been raised, however, whether it is not time to 

 look beyond education to the possibility of improving the human stock ; 

 whether education is, after all, the only way of civilizing the individual. 

 When the garden vegetable or the domestic animal fails to meet our 

 needs, we improve its breed — so the argument runs; we breed for 

 size, for strength, for flavor, for color, for endurance, for speed, or for 

 general service. When we find that the part of our human stock which 

 is best fitted to carry the cumulative load of civilization is weak, or 

 degenerate, or inclined to sterility, why do we not look to the im- 

 provement of those strains that are mentally fittest and to the elimina- 

 tion of the bad? The argument, you observe, assumes that mental 

 endowment and mental capacity are heritable possessions. Is the as- 



