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 us ask ourselves whether
these leaders of thought who can claim long lineal descent from learned
ancestors show any mental capacity over and above that which is
displayed by those commoners who are also in the foremost ranks of
thought and science, but who cannot lay claim to such continuous
ancestral training.

If we admit the existence of two such separate classes to-day then the
answer must surely be that there is no mental difference discernible
between them. But I think we may safely conclude that there has been
very little of the kind of descent here presumed. It would be well-nigh
impossible to find people who could prove an unbroken lineage of