Before we can venture to proceed with this investigation, it is necessary at once to separate from each other the question of our innate intellectual activity, and that of our intellectual property. We, in this nineteenth century, are the inheritors of a vast fund of accumulated knowledge—an intellectual property—which is infinitely greater than that possessed by the Greeks at the time of Socrates and Plato, yet I do not think that anyone would venture to assert that an average Englishman of to-day has better brain tissue and corresponding intellectual activity than that which was possessed by an average ancient Greek; indeed, some with Galton would say that the Englishman’s brain power is very inferior. We have always to bear in mind that, owing to our possession of the faculty of language spoken and written, our intellectual property, like our material property in houses, land, etc., has been, and is being, transmitted to us from generation to generation, and that we at the present time are recipients of the accumulations amassed by the restless intellectual activity of our direct and indirect ancestors. We cannot, therefore, determine whether we are increasing in our intellectual activity by the amount of knowledge we possess, and we must seek some other evidence.
Equally valueless would be a comparison between the intellectual activity of the Greeks or Romans and ourselves, taking as a test say the number of distinguished writers per million of population; for the Greek and Roman people are not related to us in direct line of descent, but are remote cousins. We can, however, obtain information which is of the greatest value as to the intellectual power of our direct forefathers at dates which may be counted back by thousands of years. Although they have left no written records behind them—for writing, even at the later part of the period referred to, was a rough implement, and placed in the hands of very few—yet they have left behind them, buried in their sepulchral mounds, their skulls, silent witnesses of the power and activity of the minds that once inhabited them.
[The Neolithic compared with the Modern English Skulls.]
The skull is the bony covering to the brain and the great organs of sense placed in the head; it develops with them, and is adapted with them as these organs during growth assume their proper racial and family characteristics. By an exhaustive examination and comparison of the skulls of different individuals of different races, the anthropometrist is able with certainty to affirm regarding the skulls of unknown persons their race and their general position in the scale of intellectual development. In a race where brain power is great, the brain pan is large and capacious, to accommodate the organ within it; it is a large-brain-small-jaw skull. In a race in which the brain power is limited, we have the small-brain-big-jaw skull. In races on much the same intellectual level, but who differ from each other in special physical and mental characters, the skull is generally a recognisable feature, and one can pick out at once the long skull of an Aryan from the broader skull of a Finn or Magyar.
Many of the sepulchral mounds just alluded to have been opened, notably by General Pitt-Rivers and Canon Greenwell, and the remains of well-preserved skulls have in several hundreds of instances been found. These go back to very remote antiquity, in many instances to the Stone Age, which we may place at least before the Christian era. When these skulls are examined, they are found to be similar to many of our own. When we look at them, we feel that there is no reason to assume that they are of a lower type than our own, or that the men and women of whom they are the remains would not, were they possessed of our advantages of education, etc., take an equal status in society with us. Some of them, especially those removed from the Vikings’ graves, must have belonged to magnificent specimens of humanity.
[Abeyance of Brain Development since Neolithic Times.]
The evidence, and it is of a most substantial kind, would seem to point strongly to the practical abeyance of organic intellectual development from the time mankind first formed simple communities for purposes of self-defence and mutual aid up to the present time. It would follow, therefore, that although we have been accumulating intellectual property, we have not necessarily become more intellectually active.
[Social Communities do not permit of the Destruction of the Less Intellectually Capable.]
But it may not unnaturally be asked, How is this state of things compatible with our views regarding selection? for we have seen that struggle and competition between brain and brain has incessantly been going on, and it seems to be a natural sequence that the brains of the community must be improved by selection.
We come here, however, to an outstanding difference between the results of the competition of one animal and another, and with that of one member of a community with another. In the animal world, the sickly, or the feeble, or deficient, have always tended towards destruction, their more capable fellows having as a rule an interest in their destruction. A sickly fowl or pigeon has not only to compete at great disadvantage with its fellows for its food, but it has to face a pitiless instinct which leads the healthy ones to destroy it as soon as its weakness is apparent. In the animal world, competition is to the death; it is competition without compromise, in which the conqueror alone remains to continue the race.