Mental Evolution i 

 Wnose honest heart is 



There can be little doubt that if other animals had been 

 valued for their moral qualities, had those been carefully 

 developed from generation to generation, they would liaw 

 shown a like, or a greater improvement. The intellectual 

 qualities shown by trained elephants, which in their youth 

 have roamed wild through the forests, is so marvellous, that it 

 is difficult to imagine or estimate what intelligence of the race 

 might become after a few generations of cultivation. And 

 the same remark applies to the acuteness of intellect shown in 

 captivity by many apes and monkeys, which have been 

 brought fresh from their native woods. What progress would 

 creatures so intelligent, so teachable, so insatiably curious and 

 so persevering make after a few generations of culture ? 



But putting aside the great development in the psychology 

 of the dog, we have in paleontology the most unanswerable 

 evidence of the vast improvement which has taken place in 

 the brains of mammals since Eocene times. 



In our own day the brains of the higher mammals show a 

 great increase in the cerebrum, the part of the brain concerned 

 especially with intellectual functions and its surface is greatly 

 increased by convolutions. Gradually as we go back in geo- 

 logical time the cerebral hemispheres are smaller, then they 

 no longer cover the mid-brain, and the latter shows distinctly, 

 as in reptiles and fishes there are of course no convolutions, 

 and finally in the Eocene we meet with mammals, immense in 

 size, but with the brains of reptiles. 1 



A faulty nomenclature has probably had a great deal to 

 answer for in the tardy recognition of the intellectual powers of 

 the lower animals. Ideas have been divided into " simple " 

 and " general," or into " concrete " and " abstract," It was 

 impossible to deny the existence of simple ideas in brutes, but 

 it was, and is, contended that they are incapable of abstract 

 ideas. Mr. Romanes points out the existence of a wide terri- 

 tory between simple and abstract ideas, and he proposes a 



Origin of the Fittest. Cope. 



