Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/197

bigger and better brain than that of the orang-outang or the chimpanzee, and the chest is more human in shape than that of the gibbon. But it is not so much perhaps in these physical changes as in the general cast of the countenance and the peculiar expression of the eye that the variation toward intellectuality and humanity is most clearly reflected. A single tear trembling on the mother's cheek bears witness to the awakening of a kind of consciousness and the stirrings of an emotional nature wholly foreign to the simian breast, and seems a presentiment of all the future woes and miseries of the race. The father's sterner features radiate with paternal pride mingled with a certain thoughtfulness and shadowed by vague anxiety, and, although his susceptibilities are less easily excited and his solicitudes less lively than those of his tender-hearted helpmate, he feels the burden of his responsibilities, lives in the future as well as in the past and present, and already answers to Shakespeare's definition of man as a being that "looks before and after." It is the masterly delineation of these spiritual qualities that reveals the peculiar preeminence of Max as an artist and proves the accuracy of his observations and deductions as an anthropologist. The face of the nursling is invisible, but the shapeliness of the head and the symmetrical proportions of the hands pressing the mother's breast are remarkably human and preclude the possibility of any atavistic reversion in their offspring. Nearly a century ago the German philosopher and psychologist, J. F. Herbart, stated very succinctly the superiority of man's physical structure and constitution in promoting his mental development: "He has hands, he has speech, he lives through a long, helpless infancy." The Pithecanthropus alalus fulfills only the first and third of these conditions, but with an additional convolution of the lobes of the brain and a slight modification of the larynx he will acquire the faculty of articulate speech, on which the rapid and progressive growth of the intellectual capacities and moral character so largely depends.

 

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We often complain, says the report of the American University Extension Society, that the foreigners among us debauch our politics by consenting to serve as mere instruments of designing politicians; but we must remember that these same designing politicians are the only people who have been willing hitherto to give any attention whatever to the political education of these classes of our citizens. The University Extension Society claims to have made the first systematic effort toward helping our foreign-born citizens to qualify themselves for their new position. Courses have been given in quarters of the city (Philadelphia) where recent immigrants have attended them in considerable numbers. "It was pathetic" to observe the eagerness with which audiences of Russian Jews were bent on learning something of the government and institutions of their adopted country,