ance has ever been
noticed by these people, who are very observant in these matters, of any
sign of such an inherited characteristic in any of their female
children.

The ordinary layman, though he may feel strongly interested in the
problems of heredity and evolution, has seldom the leisure or the
opportunity for the careful study of biological data, and he must
therefore leave these to the specialists in scientific enquiry, but he
is by no means precluded from using his own common-sense in drawing
conclusions from the ordinary plain facts of life observable around him.
It is when we come to consider this most important question in its
bearing upon the mental side of the human being that the ordinary layman
feels himself to be no less competent to form an opinion than the
trained man of science.

Is it possible, then, we ask, for the parent whose intellect has been
developed through training in his lifetime to transmit to his children
any portion of this acquired increment of mental capacity, or, putting
the question in more concrete terms, is it possible for a parent to
transmit to his offspring any part of that power to increase the size
and quality of the brain which may be assumed to have resulted in his
own case from mental exercise? The question must not be misunderstood.
We do not ask whether clever parents do as a rule have clever children;
what we want to know is whether the successive sharpening of the wits of
generations of people does, or does not, eventually result in
establishing a real and cumulative asset of mental capacity.

Seeing that universal education has only come about within the latter
part of the last century it must be clear that the vast majority of the
present generation of educated Europeans are descended from people who
never had any of that education which so many people nowadays regard as
essential to the development and growth of the intellectual powers. But
although education has only recently become, in various degrees, common
to all white people, the light of learning has always been kept burning,
however dimly at times, in certain places and circles, and it may,
perhaps, be possible to find people to-day who are the descendants of
those favoured few who have enjoyed, during many unbroken generations,
the privilege of liberal education. Now let us assume that there are at
present a small number of such people in the forefront of the
intellectual activity of the day, and then let