while the Marlboroughs and the Wellingtons do not
seem to bud out spontaneously into great commanders in the second
generation. True, there are numerous cases such as that of the
Herschels, father and son, or the two Scaligers, or the Caracci, or the
Pitts, or the Scipios, and a dozen more, where the genius, once
developed, has persisted for two or three, or even four lives: but these
instances really cast no light at all upon our central problem, which is
just this--How does the genius come in the first place to be developed
at all from parents in whom individually no particular genius is
ultimately to be seen?

Suppose we take, to start with, a race of hunting savages in the
earliest, lowest, and most undifferentiated stage, we shall get really
next to no personal peculiarities or idiosyncrasies of any sort amongst
them. Every one of them will be a good hunter, a good fisherman, a good
scalper and a good manufacturer of bows and arrows. Division of labour,
and the other troublesome technicalities of our modern political
economy, are as unknown among such folk as the modern nuisance of
dressing for dinner. Each man performs all the functions of a citizen on
his own account, because there is nobody else to perform them for
him--the medium of exchange known as hard cash has not, so far as he is
concerned, yet been invented; and he performs them well, such as they
are, because he inherits from all his ancestors aptitudes of brain and
muscle in these directions, owing to the simple fact that those among
his collateral predecessors who didn't know how to snare a bird, or were
hopelessly stupid in the art of chipping flint arrowheads, died out of
starvation, leaving no representatives. The beneficent institution of
the poor law does not exist among savages, in order to enable the
helpless and incompetent to bring up families in their own image. There,
survival of the fittest still works out its own ultimately benevolent
and useful end in its own directly cruel and relentless way, cutting
off ruthlessly the stupid or the weak, and allowing only the strong and
the cunning to become the parents of future generations.

Hence every young savage, being descended on both sides from ancestors
who in their own way perfectly fulfilled the ideal of complete
savagery--were good hunters, good fishers, good fighters, good craftsmen
of bow or boomerang--inherits from these his successful predecessors all
those qualities of eye and hand a