xv DARWINISM APPLIED TO MAX 467 



the early migrations of man, or with the conquest and exter- 

 mination of weaker by more powerful peoples. The Greeks 

 did not successfully resist the Persian invaders by any aid 

 from their few mathematicians, but by military training, 

 patriotism, and self -sacrifice. The barbarous conquerors of 

 the East, Timurlane and Gengkhis Khan, did not owe their 

 success to any superiority of intellect or of mathematical 

 faculty in themselves or their followers. Even if the great 

 conquests of the Romans were, in part, due to their systematic 

 military organisation, and to their skill in making roads and 

 encampments, which may, perhaps, be imputed to some exercise 

 of the mathematical faculty, that did not prevent them from 

 being conquered in turn by barbarians, in whom it was almost 

 entirely absent. And if we take the most civilised peoples of 

 the ancient world — the Hindoos, the Arabs, the Greeks, and 

 the Romans, all of whom had some amount of mathematical 

 talent — we find that it is not these, but the descendants of the 

 barbarians of those days — the Celts, the Teutons, and the 

 Slavs — who have proved themselves the fittest to survive in 

 the great struggle of races, although we cannot trace their 

 steadily growing success during past centuries either to the 

 -ion of any exceptional mathematical faculty or to its 

 exercise. They have indeed proved themselves, to-day, to be 

 possessed of a marvellous endowment of the mathematical 

 faculty ; but their success at home and abroad, as colonists or 

 as conquerors, as individuals or as nations, can in no way be 

 traced to this faculty, since they were almost the last who 

 devoted themselves to its exercise. We conclude, then, that 

 the present gigantic development of the mathematical faculty 

 is wholly unexplained by the theory of natural selection, and 

 must be due to some altogether distinct cause. 



The Origin of the Musical and Artistic Faculties. 



These distinctively human faculties follow very closely the 

 lines of the mathematical faculty in their progressive develop- 

 ment, and serve to enforce the same argument. Anions; the 



' CO 



lower savages music, as we understand it, hardly exists, though 

 they all delight in rude musical sounds, as of drums, tom-toms, 

 or gongs : and they also sing in monotonous chants. Almost 

 exactly as they advance in general intellect, and in the arts 



