Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 80.djvu/93

Rh word-blind and figure-blind. He is cruel to the cat, appropriates to his own use the property of others, and insists vehemently upon having what he wants at whatever inconvenience to another. He is now a low-grade imbecile without moral ideas. He will prove himself not to be "feeble-minded" if, as he approaches puberty, all of these and the other socially important undeveloped conditions prove, under fair culture, capable of development up to the corresponding "normal" conditions. Defectiveness is thus a persistent infantile condition of one or more characteristics; a failure of certain socially important traits to develop.

Now there is a well-known biological principle that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"—that the child in his development passes through the same series of physical and mental stages that the adults did in the successive generations of the race's development. So we may infer that man's remote ancestors did not go in their adult stage beyond the point where this infant-man is now. Indeed, the adult apes, nearest allies of our ancestors, show the same inability to talk, to dress, to regard property rights and to be gentle and considerate toward others that the infant shows. And we can not escape the conclusion that the gradual acquisition of social traits by the normal child follows much the same road as the evolution of social man from non-gregarious apes. But, there are men who never develop these social traits. And if we study the pedigrees of such men carefully (and many of them have been studied for six or seven generations) we trace back a continuous trail of the defects until the conclusion is forced upon us that the defects of this germ plasm have surely come all the way down from man's ape-like ancestors, through 200 generations or more. This germ plasm that we are tracing remains relatively simple; it has never gained (or only temporarily, at most) the one or the many characteristics whose absence we call, quite inadequately, defects. Feeble-mindedness is, thus, an uninterrupted transmission from our animal ancestry. It is not reversion; it is direct inheritance.

To summarize: Man is evolving and in that evolution he has lost some physical traits and gained some mental ones. But neither in their losses nor in their gains have all strains evolved to the same extent. Some races have lost the skin pigment, but others have made little progress in this direction. We are getting rid of our body coat of hair, but the Akkas of the Upper Nile and special smaller strains have a very hairy body, and so appendix and tail (coccyx) show variations that run in families. Likewise in the acquisition of mental traits, whole races differ in their ability to speak, to count, to foresee. The Ethiopian has no more need for thrift than the tropical monkey and has not acquired it. It is not surprising that there are strains, even