OCR Rendition - approximate

326 Ilereditary Talent and Character. i f some craving, like that of a bird about to emigrate, they have abandoned their home, flung away their dress, and sought their countrymen in the bush, among whom they have subsequently been found living in contented barbarism, without a vestige of their gentle nurture. This is eminently the case with the Australians, and I have heard of many others in South Africa. There are also numerous instances in England where the restless nature of gipsy half-blood asserts itself with irresistible force. Another difference, which may either be, duo to natural selection or to original difference of race, is the fact that savages seem incapable of progress after the first few years of their life. The average children of all races are much on a par. Occasionally, those of the lower races are more precocious than the AngloSaxons ; as a brute beast of a few weeks old is certainly more apt and forward than a child of the same ago. But, as the years go by, the higher races continue to progress,, while the lower ones gradually stop. They" remain children in mind, with the passions of grown men. Eminent genius commonly asserts itself in tenderyears, butit continues long to develop. The highest minds in the highest race seem to have been those who had the longest boyhood. It is not those who were little men in early youth who have succeeded. Here I may remark that, in the great mortality that besets the children of our poor, those who are members of precocious families, and who are therefore able to help in earning wages at a very early ago, have a marked advantage over their competitors. They, on the whole, live, and breed their like, while the others die. 3ut, if this sort of precocity be unfavourable to a raceif it be generally followed - by an early arrest of development, and by a premature old age-then modern industrial civilization, in encouraging precocious varieties of men, ,deteriorates the breed. Besides these three points of difference -endurance of steady labour, tameness of disposition, and 'projonged development-.1 know of i lone that, very markedly distinguishes the nature of the lower classes of civilized man from that of barbarians. In' the excitement of a pillaged town the English soldier is just as brutal as the savage. Gentle manners 'seem, under those circumstances, to have been a mere gloss thrown by education over a barbarous nature. One of the effects of civilization is to diminish the rigour of the application of the law of natural selection. It preserves weakly lives, that would, have perished in barbarous lands. The sickly children of a wealthy family have a better chance of living and rearing offspring than the stalwart children of a poor one. As with the body, so with the mind. Poverty is more adverse to early marriages than is natural bad temper, or inferiority of intellect. In civilized society, money interposes her aegis between the law of natural selection and very many of its rightful victims. Scrofula and madness are naturalised among us by wealth ; short-sightedness is becoming so. There seems no limit to the morbific tendencies of body or mind that might accumulate in a land where the law of primogeniture was general, and where riches were more esteemed than personal qualities. Neither is there any known limit to the intellectual and moral grandeur of nature that might be introduced into aristocratical families, if their representatives, who have such rare privilege in winning wives that please them best, should invariably, generation after generation, marry with a view of transmitting those noble qualties to their descendants. Inferior blood in the representative of a family might be eliminated from it in a few generations. The share that a man retains in the constitution of his remote descendants is ' inconceivably small. The - father transmits, on an average, one-half of his nature, the grandfather one-fourth, the great-grandfather oneeighth ; the share decreasing step by step, in a geometrical ratio, with great rapidity. Thus the man who claims descent from a Norman baron, who accompanied William the Conqueror twenty-six generations ago, has so minute a share of that baron's influence in his