234 INITIATIVE IN EVOLUTION 



The successive invasion of Britain by Low German tribes 

 in the fifth century, and the Scandinavian hordes of Swedes, Danes, 

 Norwegians, Letts and Finns in the eighth and ninth teach the 

 same lesson. The later condition and development of the Northmen 

 in France, Italy, Spain, Sicily and Britain have only to be compared 

 for a moment with that of their races who remained in Norway, 

 Sweden and Denmark and their descendants, to bring clearly 

 before one's mind the profound influence exerted by the cerebral 

 constitution of the original Viking hosts on their career in their 

 new environments, and, indeed, on the environments themselves ; 

 as in intermarriage with their conquered foes. 



These examples have been chosen for the reason that one 

 feature is common to them all, the introduction of an individual 

 or group into new environments by reason of the constitution of 

 their brains, irrespective of the contributing factors. If these 

 be sound analogies they bear closely on the matter of initiative 

 in the evolution of new forms of life. The men in question came 

 to their task, in their day, with a certain equipment of brain derived 

 from many ancestors and much nurture. Unconscious arbiters 

 of their fate and that of multitudes who should follow them, they 

 initiated a course of physical and cerebral evolution of which we 

 can see much revealed before our eyes. The motive power of their 

 conduct bears a relation to their physical forms that the engines 

 of a motor-car do to its varied forms of body. The latter are 

 modified indefinitely to suit convenience, comfort and grace, but 

 fundamentally they exist and are energised by the former, just as 

 structure is modified for the performance of function. 



This fact is occasionally brought vividly to the mind of an 

 observer when he first passes a Rolls-Royce car in all its glory and 

 magnificence, and then a rough squalid kind of trolly in which the 

 engine-parts of a similar future Rolls-Royce are out for trial. 

 In principle it is not a long step from these illustrations to the 

 diverse environments of animals in which their lot is cast, and 

 their reaction to them as to behaviour and structural change. 



Some Changes in Habits of Man. 



There are two current views as to the present erect posture 

 of man, one which traces it to the adoption of a new posture by a 

 pronograde four-footed ancestor, and the other that man's ancestors 

 were "never typically pronograde with four supporting limbs, " 

 but derived from an arboreal stock in which the forelimbs were 

 mobile rather than stable. Whenever or wherever man became 

 orthograde he opened up for himself and his descendants immense 



