Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/555

Rh for development, while at the same time they have not been able to dispense them from the necessity of work. Thus, at all events, it has been in the past. How it will be in the future is a question which the data before us in no way help to answer. So far as can be seen, the changing conditions of life have as yet made no change in the conditions required for producing genius. Life in the old towns formerly fertile in intellectual ability—towns like Edinburgh, Norwich, Bury St. Edmunds and Plymouth—was altogether unlike life in our modern urban centers, and there is yet no sign that the latter will equal the former in genius-producing power. Nor is there any sign that the education of the proletariat will lead to a new development of eminent men; the lowest class in Great Britain, so far as the data before us show, has not exhibited any recent tendency to a higher yield of genius, and what production it is accountable for remains rural rather than urban.