lt upon the ice, wore the skin of the
seal, and ate raw fish, had as much brain and as generous a measure of
talent as have their remote descendants who wear sealskins, and eat
ices and caviar?" He continues that we have little or nothing to show
that the hereditary or innate growth of the mind has kept pace with
the growing social heritage; that as regards mental endowment we begin
where our distant ancestors began. The chief difference between us and
them is that we proceed at once to burden ourselves with information
and obligation which for them did not exist. To compass our languages,
sciences, histories, arts, the complicated social, political, moral
regime, we are supplied with virtually the same minds that primitive
man used for his primitive needs. Is it any wonder, he asks, that
"education" is the central problem for our or any other advanced
civilization?

The biologist asks whether it is not high time to look beyond this
artificial bolster of education, to the possibility of actual
improvement of the innate mental abilities of man. The student of
heredity and evolution looking at this problem has two contributions
to make. First, if the mental capabilities of the present race are too
limited, increase them; if our minds are too weak to carry the burdens
which now must be carried, do not give up the task--strengthen the
racial mind. Second, if we should seem to be in danger of developing a
stock which is well fitted and able to carry the load of mental
acquirement and to push on intellectually, but which is at the same
time physically deficient, weak, or sterile, or susceptible to
disease, do not let the intellectual capabilities diminish, but build
up the physical constitution to a higher supporting level. These are
not idle suggestions nor whimsical schemes. The biologist makes them
knowing that these things are possible; not only possible, they must
be accomplished. We are foolishly building our civilization in the
form of an inverted pyramid of individually acquired characteristics.
This structure can be made stable only by supplying a broader basis of
innate ability which can safely carry the load. This is the first
biological warning to sociology.

The second warning we may put in the form in which Ray Lankester in
his "Kingdom of Man" has recently presented it so strikingly and which
we may abstract freely and with some interpolation. "In Nature's
struggle for existence, death ... is the fate of the