Page:Darwinism by Alfred Wallace 1889.djvu/491

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XV
DARWINISM APPLIED TO MAN
467

the early migrations of man, or with the conquest and extermination of weaker by more powerful peoples. The Greeks did not successfully resist the Persian invaders by any aid from their few mathematicians, but by military training, patriotism, and self-sacrifice. The barbarous conquerors of the East, Timurlane and Gengkhis Khan, did not owe their success to any superiority of intellect or of mathematical faculty in themselves or their followers. Even if the great conquests of the Romans were, in part, due to their systematic military organisation, and to their skill in making roads and encampments, which may, perhaps, be imputed to some exercise of the mathematical faculty, that did not prevent them from being conquered in turn by barbarians, in whom it was almost entirely absent. And if we take the most civilised peoples of the ancient world—the Hindoos, the Arabs, the Greeks, and the Romans, all of whom had some amount of mathematical talent—we find that it is not these, but the descendants of the barbarians of those days—the Celts, the Teutons, and the Slavs—who have proved themselves the fittest to survive in the great struggle of races, although we cannot trace their steadily growing success during past centuries either to the possession of any exceptional mathematical faculty or to its exercise. They have indeed proved themselves, to-day, to be possessed of a marvellous endowment of the mathematical faculty; but their success at home and abroad, as colonists or as conquerors, as individuals or as nations, can in no way be traced to this faculty, since they were almost the last who devoted themselves to its exercise. We conclude, then, that the present gigantic development of the mathematical faculty is wholly unexplained by the theory of natural selection, and must be due to some altogether distinct cause.

The Origin of the Musical and Artistic Faculties.

These distinctively human faculties follow very closely the lines of the mathematical faculty in their progressive development, and serve to enforce the same argument. Among the lower savages music, as we understand it, hardly exists, though they all delight in rude musical sounds, as of drums, tom-toms, or gongs; and they also sing in monotonous chants. Almost exactly as they advance in general intellect, and in the arts