ambition to go forward, is one of the most pronounced of the individual and racial characteristics of the winning sections of the human family. Now, one of the most common of all forms in which this instinct expresses itself is the unwillingness of men, in a state of civilisation such as that in which we are living, to marry and bring up families in a state of life lower than that into which they were themselves born. As we rise beyond the middle classes the task becomes, however, more and more difficult the higher we go, until amongst the highest aristocratic families it has long ceased to be possible to any extent. While we have, therefore, on the one hand, the constant tendency of aspiring ability to rise into the highest class, we have, on the other hand, within the class itself, the equally constant tendency towards restriction of numbers, towards celibacy, and towards reversion to the classes below. This is the largest operating cause constantly tending to the decay and extinction of aristocratic families. But while this cause has been already, to a considerable extent, recognised in the limited application here noticed, its vital connection with a much wider natural law, operating throughout society at large, and upon the race in general, has scarcely received any attention. Not only do the aristocratic classes die out, but it would appear that the members of the classes, into which it is always the tendency of a very prevalent influences, and the hard and common stock of animal life to blossom and to bloom into shapes of delicate beauty. As power to gratify his wants increases, so does aspiration grow. Held down to lower levels of desire, Lucullus will sup with Lucullus; twelve boars turn on spits that Antony's mouthful of meat may be done to a turn; every kingdom of Nature be ransacked to add to Cleopatra's charms, and marble colonnades and hanging gardens and pyramids that rival the hills arise.”—Progress and Poverty. type of intellectual ability to rise, are being continually weeded out by a process of natural selection, which it appears to have been the effect of our own civilisation to foster to a peculiar degree. This natural law was clearly brought out in a remarkable paper read by Dr. Ogle before the Statistical Society of London in March 1890.1 The professional and independent classes (to the level of which the intellectual ability of all the classes below continually tends to rise) marry, says the author, considerably later, and have far fewer children per marriage than the classes below them. For instance, he shows that the mean age at marriage in the professional and independent classes is seven years more advanced for men and four years more advanced for women than amongst miners; and, further, "that the lower the station in life the earlier the age at which marriage is contracted, and that the difference, in this respect, between the upper and lower classes is very great indeed." In addition to this it was also found that the professional and independent classes possessed a proportion of permanent bachelors far above the rest. We have here apparently the same tendency extending downwards through the community, and continually operating to prevent the intellectual average of one generation from rising above the level of that preceding it. The same law of population has been noticed in France, where it is found that the agricultural population have more children than the industrial, and that still fewer children are born to families where the fathers follow a liberal profession. It operates also in other countries, and it does not at all tend to be restricted, but rather the reverse, by that social development taking place amongst us which is ever tending to 1 Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, June 1890. lighten the burthens of existence for the lower classes of the community at the general expense. The full meaning of these facts is not, indeed, immediately perceived. Mr. Galton, in a striking passage, has dealt with what he described as the heavy doom of any subsection of a prolific people, which in this manner multiplied less rapidly than the rest of the community; and the example which he takes may be profitably quoted at length. He says, "Suppose two men M and N about 22 years old, each of them having, therefore, the expectation of living to the age of 55, or 33 years longer; and suppose that M marries at once, and that his descendants, when they arrive at the same age, do the same; but that N delays until he has laid by money, and does not marry before he is 33 years old, that is to say, 11 years later than M, and his descendants also follow his example. Let us further make the two very moderate suppositions that the early marriages of race M result in an increase of 1 in the next generation, and also in the production of 33 generations in a century; while the late marriages of race N result in an increase of only 14 in the next generation, and in 21 generations in one century. It will be found that an increase of 11⁄2 in each generation accumulating on the principle of compound interest during 33 generations becomes rather more than 18 times the original amount, while an increase of 14 for 24 generations is barely as much as times the original amount. Consequently the increase of the race of M at the end of a century will be greater than that of N, in the ratio of 18 to 7, that is to say, it will be rather more than 2 times as great. In two centuries the progeny of M will be more than 6 times, and in three centuries more than 15 times as numerous as those of N."1 1 Hereditary Genius, p. 340. These are noteworthy conclusions. It is evident that our society must be considered as an organism which is continually renewing itself from the base, and dying away in those upper strata into which it is the tendency of a large class of intellectual ability to rise; the strata which possess the reproductive capacity most fully being probably the lower sections of the middle class. Taken in connection with the probable higher intellectual development of past races now extinct, such facts must be held as tending to establish the view that our intellectual development is a far slower and more complex process than we have hitherto imagined it to be. They render it still more difficult for us to adhere to the view according to which human progress is to be regarded as being mainly a matter of intellectual development. This latter development seems to be subject to larger evolutionary forces which, so far from furthering it, tend, in the conditions we have been discussing, to check and restrain it in a most marked manner. If the examination is continued, and we now carry forward into other departments our scrutiny of the facts upon which the prevailing opinion which identifies social progress with intellectual progress is founded, it is only to discover that difficulties and discrepancies of the most striking kind continue to present themselves even in quarters where they might be least expected. A great quantity of data as to the relative cranial development of different races, existing and extinct, has been collected. by anthropologists, but the conclusions to which many leading authorities have come as the result of a comparison of these data are not a little interesting. It may be observed that in nearly all anthropological literature of this kind, the position which is assumed, almost as a matter of course, at the outset, and from which all the argument proceeds is, that the attainment by any people of a state of high social development should imply a corresponding state of high intellectual development. But having started with these premises, it will be noticed what difficulties present themselves. Criticising a widely-quoted table of the cranial capacity of various races, published by M. Topinard in his Anthropologie, De Quatrefages says, its chief value is to show into what serious errors an estimation of the development of a race from its cranial capacity would lead us. "By such an estimation the troglodytes of the Cavern of L'Homme-Mort would be superior to all races enumerated in the table, including contemporary Parisians."1 Further on, from a criticism of these and other features of the same table, De Quatrefages reaches the conclusion that "there can be no real relation between the dimensions of the cranial capacity and social development. But as social development is taken by the author to imply a corresponding intellectual development, the two being often used as interconvertible terms by anthropologists, he finds himself, therefore, driven to the remarkable conclusion that the evidence generally seems to "establish beyond a doubt the fact, which already clearly results from the comparison of different races, namely, that the development of the intellectual faculties of man is to a great extent independent of the capacity of the cranium, and the volume of the brain." If, however, we come to examine for ourselves that large class of facts drawn from contemporary life, upon 1 The Human Species, by A. De Quatrefages, chap. xxx. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. |