Excursions of an evolutionist / by John Fiske.

  • John Fiske
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Excursions of an evolutionist / by John Fiske. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    319/388 (page 315)
    after age to result in the preservation of bigger and better brains, while the rest of their bodies chano-ed but little. This particular work of nat- ural selection must have gone on for an enor- mous length of time, and as its result we see that while man remains anatomically much like an ape, he has acquired a vastly greater brain with all that this implies. Zoologically the distance is small between man and the chimpanzee; psycho- logically it has become so great as to be im- measurable. But this steady increase of intelligence, as our forefathers began to become human, carried with it a steady prolongation of infancy. As mental life became more complex and various, as the things to be learned kept ever multiplying, less and less could be done before birth, more and more must be left to be done in the eai'lier years of life. So instead of being born with a few simple capacities thoroughly organized, man came at last to be born with the germs of many com- plex capacities which were reserved to be un- folded and enhanced or checked and stifled by the incidents of personal experience in each in- dividual. In this simple yet wonderful way there has been provided for man a long period during which his mind is plastic and malleable, and