express their own observations. Every day we see how children have to be
taught to act and behave. We see continually how parents have to put
pressure on their children to make them accept and apply those moral
principles and mental valuations which have guided their lives and the
lives of thousands of generations before them. We know only too well
that children do not inherit the moral standards of right and wrong of
their parents, and that to establish these principles in the young is a
matter of protracted and often painful inculcation. The proved maxim
that honesty is the best policy is still being literally hammered into
the children of to-day who seem to find it no easier to follow the
better way than did the children of the past. If mental modifications
acquired by the parents were in any degree transmissible to the
offspring then there would be no need for this constant repetition of
the same process in every new generation.

The earliest indubitable man hitherto discovered was fully evolved when
first met with, he was _homo sapiens_. By means of his human
intelligence this frail, unspecialized being became in a sense the very
lord of creation, for instead of remaining, like the animals, entirely
subject to his surroundings he subjected his surroundings to himself. By
means of this intelligence man was enabled to break away from the
absolute rule of the law of natural selection which punishes with
extinction all those types that fail in fitness for survival in the
struggle for existence, so that, unlike the animals that die out when
their particular structure does not fit in with their environment, man
by means of his thinking brain was able to equip himself with parts of
his environment, and thus to become its master. The process of evolution
ceased to affect directly this creature who had a brain that could
think, and ever since that brain was given to him man has remained
unmoved and stationary above and apart from all other living things. All