Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/472

468 twelve or fifteen, can we wonder that at present the candidate for an advanced university degree has often passed his thirtieth birthday? We should rather marvel at the elasticity of the mind's response to new needs. We know that Quaternary man sometimes possessed artistic ability—perhaps as great ability as the modern European; but what a difference in the product. We can not conceive a medieval musician—to go no further back—producing or comprehending our operas and symphonies; but who would say that native ability in music has grown in the meantime? Are we not then driven to the admission that no principle of selection has for a long time been sufficiently active to raise the level of mental endowment? We live on capital gathered and hoarded by the race. Suppose that we turn spendthrift! Francis Galton reckons that England at its best falls two grades below the highest intellect of Athens; that England produces one man of supreme eminence where the older culture produced two hundred. Suppose that by improving the breed our mental endowment should recover those two grades. The effect, direct and indirect, upon the race is not easily estimated. It is conceivable that it should give to every generation a Homer or a Dante or a Shakespeare, and to each of the European states and America a dozen Newtons and Darwins. Eugenics rests upon a scientific basis and it proposes a well-considered program for future activity. Whatever differences of opinion we may hold regarding the probable success of its methods, we must agree that civilized man may not indolently regard himself as "God's domestic animal"; that he will, on the contrary, do well to examine and to estimate the hereditary factor in his own mental development and to seek to combine for his improvement the conjoint forces of nature and nurture.