ADVANCE IN CULTURE. 3 1 



has a capacity of being raised by education, con- 

 tinued from childhood, to a degree of intelligence 

 not manifested by his kinsmen in their savage state 

 and to which, by no training, under any circumstances, 

 can brutes be brought to make the most distant 

 approach. 



Advance in culture means merely that the in- 

 herent capabilities of man's nature have been called 

 forth by education, not acquired by evolution. It has 

 not been by any fundamentally improved develop- 

 ment of his corporeal frame or mental capacity in 

 the course of generations that man has advanced to 

 his present stage of civilisation and knowledge, but 

 by the preservation, communication", and transmission 

 of experience, aca x uired in all the various ways of 

 life in successive generations. This power to pre- 

 serve, communicate and transmit the knowledge 

 acquired by experience is a grand and characteristic 

 attribute of man, the wisdom and experience of the 

 individual being thus not lost to society by his death. 



In the earliest times known to history men 

 existed with mental endowments as great as those 

 for which the most eminent men of modern times 

 have been distinguished, but they had not the 

 advantage of the same amount of accumulated 

 knowledge on record from which to start. The 

 mental capacity of man now is not greater than it was 

 some hundred years ago, and yet his achievements in 

 science, discovery, and invention within that time have 

 ibeen unparalleled in the history of any former period. 



