The child, his nature and nurture / by W.B. Drummond.

  • Drummond W. B. (William Blackley), 1868-
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The child, his nature and nurture / by W.B. Drummond. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    14/164 page 6
    struggle for existence among the higher animals brains have come to count for more and more. The history of the higher animals of our own day has been in the main a history of evolving brain power. During the untold ages which preceded the appearance of the mammalian type Nature gave almost her whole power to the evolution of perfect bodily form. When in the early tertiary period intelligence began to count for something in the struggle for existence, the. brain of the highest animals was, according to modern standards, absurdly small ; but in the period which has elapsed since then, the brain has undergone, amongst the mammalia, a far greater development in size and complexity of structure than it did in all the preceding ages. The development of intelligence, then, we may look upon as having been closely associated with the replacing of instinctive acts by habits which were acquired anew by the individuals of each generation, who were thereby enabled to adapt themselves to alterations in their environment, to deal with emergencies, and to obtain supremacy over individuals and species more closely bound in the mesh of circumstance. But this lapsing of instinctive powers, at any rate of those necessary for the individual life, could not proceed very far until provision was made for the care of the young during the period of acquirement or education. Hence it is that we find the greatest intelligence among those animals that take care of their young, and we may agree with Mr Fiske in finding in the prolongation of the period of infancy in man the pre- liminary requisite for the evolution of his highest faculties. From these considerations then it appears that the infant with its all-pervading similitude of structure to that of the higher mammals differs from them very markedly in this, that it inherits from its parents a far smaller stock of ready-made instincts,1 and still more in this, that it inherits an infinitely larger capacity for education. And by capacity for education is meant nothing less than this, that the child from his earliest infancy tends to adapt himself to his environment, to yield 1 See chapter xi., Instinct and Habit.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3