In order, therefore, to obtain any direct modification of the race in the way of mental improvement the physical effect of education must be such as to ensure longer life and with it, the concomitant chance of greater fertility for those who are educated against those who are not, so that the latter would tend to die out while the former would continue to increase their numbers.  In other words, education must prove to be of survival value.  Seeing that where education has increased most the birth-rate has tended to decrease it seems clear that we cannot regard continuous mental training as a favourable factor in the competition of propagation of human varieties.

If then we accept the conclusion that the effects of individual experience are not cumulatively hereditary we shall cease to cavil at the fact that there has been no anatomical or structural progress in the human body or brain since the time when men first became social and civilised beings, that is to say, since they first began to work together with their heads and hands, and we shall see that that which was to be expected has always happened, in that, from the earliest historical times to the present day, human life has been as the rolling and unrolling of a carpet.  Cycles of civilisations, all essentially similar, have been evolved, one after another, to endure for a while and then to fade away, leaving the raw material of human kind as it was from the beginning.  There is no evidence of any advancement in physique, intellect or moral character.  The leaders of mankind were the law-givers, whether they were witch doctors, priests, chiefs, prophets or kings, and they all sought to establish their laws by claiming supernatural delegation and authority.  With writing came the codes, and when we compare the statutes of Hammurabi, who flourished about 2,200 years B.C., with those compiled by his successors, Moses, Solon, Justinian and Napoleon, we find in them all evidence of the same mental appreciation and capacity in dealing with the social conditions and problems of their respective periods.  The greatest products of art are still met with in the sculptured forms of ancient Greece, those images of serene beauty which may be imitated but not excelled.  The reasoning powers of the ancient philosophers who, long before Christ was born, debated the still unanswered riddles of existence, when we compare the paucity of data on which they had to work with the wealth of knowledge now available, must be ranked as high as the intellectual ability of our foremost thinkers of to-day.  In mechanical proficiency the world has indeed advanced to an astonishing extent, but the perfection of our modern machinery means only a gradual and very recent advance upon earlier methods and does not denote a corresponding development in the mind itself.  The Greeks had no machinery to speak of, neither had the English in the days of Shakespeare and Newton, but who can doubt that the engineers of those times would have been equal to the