40 
Extracts from British and Foreign Journals, 
HEREDITARY INFLUENCE, ANIMAL AND HUMAN. 
( Continued from vol. xxix, p. 720.) 
We must forbear entering upon the many interesting 
topics which the application of the laws of heritage suggest, 
and conclude this paper with a glance at the influence of 
these laws in the development of the human race. History 
is one magnificent corollary on the laws of transmission. 
Were it not for these laws civilization would be impossible. 
We inherit the acquired experience of our forefathers— their 
tendencies, their aptitudes, their habits, their improvements. 
It is because what is organically acquired becomes organi- 
cally transmitted, that the brain of a European is twenty 
or thirty cubic inches greater than the brain of a Papuan, 
and that the European is born with aptitudes of which 
the Papuan has not the remotest indication. Mr. Herbert 
Spencer, in his very original and remarkable c Principles 
of Psychology, 5 quotes the evidence of Lieutenant Walpole, 
that “ the Sandwich Islanders, in all the early parts of their 
education, are exceedingly quick, but not in the higher 
branches; they have excellent memories, and learn by rote 
with wonderful facility, but will not exercise their thinking- 
faculty ; 55 which, as Mr. Spencer truly observes, indicates 
that they can receive and retain simple ideas, but are 
incompetent to the more complex processes of intelligence, 
because these have not become organized in the race. A 
similar fact is noticed in the Australians and Hindoos. Nor 
is this wide difference between them and the European 
confined to the purely ratiocinative processes ; an analogous 
difference is traceable in their moral conceptions. In the lan- 
guage of the Australians there are no words answering to our 
terms justice , sin , guilL They have not acquired those ideas. 
In all savages the sympathetic emotions are quite rudimentary, 
and the horror which moves a European at the sight of 
cruelty, w^ould be as incomprehensible to the savage as the 
terror which agitates a w oman at the sight of a mouse. What 
we observe in the development from childhood to manhood, 
we also observe in the development of the Human Family, 
namely, a slow subjection of the egotistic to the sympathetic 
impulses. This has been overlooked, or not sufficiently ap- 
preciated, in the dispute about a Moral Sense. One school 
