over the western sea and influence Europe till the break up of the
Ægean civilisation. The Homeric lays and Hellenic myths reflect the
inception of a Semitic expansion, which must be placed after 1100 B.C.
Even in Homer there is more mention of Greek ships than of Sidonian,
and the Tyrian power is yet to come. The latter pushed westward later,
and the founding of Carthage, usually dated in the eighth century,
marks its first great achievement along those distant sea-routes,
which certainly the Semites had been coming to know during a couple of
centuries of huckstering trade, even if the dependence of the early
Hellenes on Phœnician knowledge of these waters has been overrated.
But, in any case, during the interval between the fall of Ægean power
and the rise of the Hellenic maritime cities these Semites counted
for much. Even in the light of Cretan discovery, we need not question
their responsibility for the Greek alphabet, and thus, indirectly, for
the ultimate medium of written communication used throughout European
civilisation; nor need it be doubted that Hellenic writers, who trace
early instruction in trade and barter to visits of Semitic ships to
their coasts, show real, though limited, knowledge of fact. Phœnician
factories were certainly established on Greek shores, and left Semitic
forms among later Greek place-names; and it is quite possible that
political power was exercised at one time by Semitic colonists in parts
of Hellas. Sufficient Phœnician art products have been found on archaic
Hellenic sites, to prove that, in the period between 1000 and 500 B.C.,
the Ægean coasts were often visited by these Semites. Such objects are
especially numerous in Rhodes, a convenient stage on the westward sea
route, and they radiate over not only Ionia and the Hellenic lands, but
also into the further Mediterranean, to Sicily and its neighbouring
islands, to Italy and South Gaul, and to Sardinia and Spain. Carthage
probably had much to say in their western distribution.
[Illustration: ÆNEAS AND DIDO: THE QUEEN OF CARTHAGE LISTENING TO THE
STORY OF THE SIEGE OF TROY
From the Painting by P. Guerin, in the Louvre.
]
[Sidenote: No Phœnician Influence in Britain]
Of Semitic influence on archaic Greek art there is considerable
evidence. After the Geometric Age, we find in the Greek lands pottery
and metal-work showing certain motives and arrangement of decoration
foreign to Ægean art, and referable ultimately to the Mesopotamian and
Egyptian. Such are the animals and monsters disposed in concentric
friezes and zones on Cypriote bowls, Corinthian vases, and the Cretan
shields of the Idaean Cave. But this influence, strong and undoubted
as it was, must not be over estimated. As the Hellenes rose to power,
their instinct of sincerity and naturalism, inherited from Ægean
civilisation, revolted against, and triumphed over, this parasitic
Semitic art, and already in the ninth or eighth century we find a
Græco-Lydian influence, which owes nothing to Phœnician, breaking
back to the east and creating the ivories of the Sargonid Age at
Nineveh. Phœnician objects thenceforward become fewer and fewer in
Hellenic strata, and in the sixth century B.C. they virtually vanish.
By this time Phœnicia had become a subject country, about to give up
the last ghost of its independence to the Greeks themselves, as its
western offshoot, Carthage, was also to surrender a little later to
another civilisation near akin to the Greek. But, needless to say, the
Semite has had his full revenge for the short tenure of his earliest
predominance in European waters. The fall of Phœnicia cleared the way
for another Semitic family to capture international trade, and, first
with one creed and then another, to conquer the Greeks, the Romans, and
the World.
There are, of course, possibilities of direct Phœnician intercourse
with non-Mediterranean Europe--for example, with England’s
south-western coasts; but they need not detain us. For whether certain
Semites came to Cornwall in quest of tin or no, it is certain that
by these no lasting influence of civilisation passed in to England.
Neither the religion, the speech, nor the script of Britain owed them
anything. Recent scholarship tends to discredit any Semitic element
even in English south-western place-names.
[Sidenote: The Origins of our Civilisations]
Such, in brief outline, are the channels through which the
civilisations of the South-eastern river-valleys could communicate
with primitive Europe. It is easier to point them out than to say
exactly what flowed along them. Seldom can so definite a debt be
recorded as that under which we lie to the Semites of Phœnicia, for the
names and the forms of the written characters which, presumably, they
themselves had borrowed from Egypt, and modified ere they passed them
westwards. Usually the obligation must be stated much more vaguely,
being confined, as in the case of Ægean influences, to little more than
a general responsibility for the spirit, and for many forms of the
expression, of the first great artistic growth on the mainland soil of
Europe, as well as for certain persistent and dynamic features in South
European cults.
Thus, it becomes even more apparent at the end of our discussion than
it was at the beginning that when all has been said about influences of
Egypt and Mesopotamia, and influences of the intermediate civilisations
of the Ægean, Syria, and Asia Minor, only a very small part of the
whole story of incipient European civilisation has been told. Nor is
it to be expected that the origin of our culture should be capable
of being adequately expressed in terms of other cultures, developed
at a great distance and under different geographical conditions.
Civilisations, destined to be living growths, spring, it seems, of
themselves, and the debts which they can incur at the first are very
small and mostly in small things. It is only when they are come to
adult estate, have bred men of wealth and leisure with open and
receptive minds, and have broken through the geographical barriers
about them, that they begin to borrow at large.
[Sidenote: In the Childhood of Europe]
One of the intermediate civilisations of which we have treated, the
Ægean, the only one whose own origins are fairly well known, offers
proof in point. Its remains indicate but trifling obligations to
neighbouring Egypt till a very late period, that which, in Crete,
we call the Third Minoan. Thereafter, in the space of two or
three generations, the evidence of its debt increases at a wholly
disproportionate rate. So too, no doubt, in the misty period of the
childhood of Central and Western Europe, little was borrowed from
abroad that was essential to civilisation; and the heavy obligations
which we owe to the Eastern lands fall in ages much more recent.
They fall, in fact, in those times which saw the Anatolian cult of
Kybéle and Attis, the Egyptian cult of Isis and Horus-Harpocrates,
the Mesopotamian cult of Mithra, and, far more momentous, of course,
than these, Christianity--Hebrew in origin if modified by Greek
conceptions--brought by a greater intermediary civilisation than any
with which we have had to deal, to the knowledge of inner European
races already long emerged from savagery, and able and eager to borrow.
DAVID GEORGE HOGARTH
[Illustration: THE TRIUMPH OF RACE
WHY ONE NATION CONQUERS ANOTHER
BY DR. G. ARCHDALL REID]
It is a familiar fact that offspring resemble their parents on the
whole, but differ from them in details. For example, the child of a
human being is always another, but never an exactly similar, human
being.
These differences in detail are of two sorts, _inborn_ and _acquired_.
Inborn or innate differences arise “by nature”; the child is inherently
unlike the parent--taller or shorter, fairer or darker, and so forth.
Acquired differences, on the other hand, are due to the conditions
under which parents and children have lived. Thus, owing to better or
worse surroundings, the child may develop better or worse than the
parent and so be taller or shorter, or a greater exposure to weather
may render him darker or fairer.
[Sidenote: Things We Cannot Inherit]
It was formerly believed by scientific men, and is still believed by
the public, that traits acquired by the parent tended to be inherited
by the child--that is, reproduced as inborn traits. Thus it was
supposed that if a man were made strong by exercise, or injured by
accident, his child would tend to inherit, in some degree at least, the
acquired benefit or injury, and as a result be naturally stronger or
more defective than the parent was at the start.
[Sidenote: Acquired Traits not Hereditary]
But very prolonged and careful investigation has proved that this is
certainly an error. For example, though for æons human beings have been
learning to speak and walk, and make a multitude of other acquirements,
yet none of these are ever inherited. In fact, owing to the evolution
of memory and the retrogression of instinct, man, of all animals,
acquires the most and inherits the least. Every child has to begin
afresh and learn what its ancestors learnt; all are born ignorant;
none speak or walk “naturally.” Each starts where the parent began,
not where he left off. The parental traits, if reproduced at all, are
always of the same kind in the child as in the parents, and appear
in the same way. That is, the inborn traits of the parent are always
inborn in the offspring; the acquired traits are never anything but
acquirements resulting from the same causes as they did in the parent.
In brief, the acquirements of the parent are never transmuted into
inborn characteristics in the child. They are never inherited. It is
admitted on all hands that inborn differences--_variations_, as they
are termed technically--tend to be inherited.
Thus, if the parent is naturally darker than the grandparent, the
child tends in colour to resemble the former more than the latter.
Since the child may vary from the parent in the same direction as the
latter varied from the grandparent, these inborn differences may be
accentuated in subsequent generations. It is due to this fact that
plant and animal breeders have improved domesticated species. They are
able to benefit the individual by improving his surroundings, but the
race they can improve only by breeding from the best. In other words,
when they have the latter end in view, they must build on natural
variations, not on acquirements.
[Sidenote: A Great Problem of Science]
[Sidenote: Differences among Kindred]
One of the most important problems in the whole range of science is the
question as to what causes offspring to differ in this inborn, natural
way from their parents. Many theories have been formulated, and the
subject is still to some extent under discussion; but the evidence is
overwhelming that variations--natural differences--are not generally
caused, as most people believe, by anything that happens to the parent
before the birth of the child, but are “spontaneous.” The subject is
a large and intricate one, and we have not space to discuss it at
length. One or two facts, however, may be mentioned. The members of
a litter of puppies, kittens, or pigs, may differ naturally amongst
themselves and from their parents in all sorts of ways--in colour,
shape, size, hairiness, disposition, and so on. One puppy may present
points of resemblance to the father, another to the mother, a third to
some ancestor, while a fourth may be unlike any of its predecessors.
Since, practically speaking, the puppies were all conditioned alike
before birth, it is evident that these great differences must be
“spontaneous.” They cannot have been caused by such things as the good
or ill health of the parents, their food, or the life they led, for, in
that case, the puppies would all have varied in the same way.
Again, malaria is, in effect, a universal disease on the West Coast
of Africa. Individuals differ naturally in their powers of resisting
it, some taking it lightly and some severely; but almost every negro
suffers, and many children perish of it. If the sufferings of the
parents caused children to be born weaker “by nature,” it is evident
that every individual would start life inferior to his predecessor at
the start, and the race would thus degenerate and ultimately become
extinct. On the other hand, if variations are “spontaneous,” if, quite
unaffected by the sufferings of the parents, some children are born
naturally different, naturally more or less resistant to malaria than
their predecessors, it is plain that the weeding out of the unfittest,
the weak against the disease, would ultimately make the race resistant
to it. In the one case the race would drift to destruction; in the
other it would undergo protective evolution. Obviously, the latter is
what has happened. Negroes show no signs of any kind of degeneration,
but they are of all races the most resistant to malaria.
[Sidenote: Suffering Produces Strength]
Similarly, Englishmen who have been much exposed to consumption and
measles, natives of India who have been much afflicted by enteric
fever and dysentery, Esquimaux who have suffered from cold, Arabs who
have endured heat, Chinamen and Jews who have long dwelt under that
complex of ill conditions found in slums and ghettos, are none of them
degenerate, but, on the contrary, have become resistant, each race
to its own particular ill-conditions in proportion to its sufferings
in the past. In fact, it may be laid down as a general rule that
races strengthen only when exposed to ill conditions, and deteriorate
only when the conditions are so favourable that the unfit are not
eliminated. An example of the latter is seen when prize breeds of
animals and plants, however well nourished and cared for, are no longer
bred with care. It follows that races, if not exterminated, are not
injured but strengthened by ill conditions, by the elimination of the
unfittest, as gold is refined by fire.
[Sidenote: Survival of the Fittest]
It is a remarkable fact that many people are able to accomplish the
surprising feat of knowing that races have become inured to ill
conditions, and of believing at the same time that the offspring of
people exposed to such conditions tend, as a rule, to be degenerate.
It is as if they believed that two and two make four, and two more
six, but that if a great number of two’s are added together the total
result is a minus quantity. Obviously the two beliefs are incompatible.
A race cannot degenerate in every generation and yet emerge in the end
strengthened from the struggle. The confusion has arisen because the
two diametrically opposite propositions are seldom considered together,
and in part also from a mistaken interpretation of what is observed in
such situations as the slums of cities. Here puny children are seen to
be derived from puny parents, and it is assumed that the children are
degenerate because the parents have suffered.
As a fact we have no reason to doubt that the children are affected in
precisely the same way as the parents. On the one hand, slums are sinks
into which descend people naturally inferior, people who have varied
spontaneously from their ancestors in such a way as to be feeble,
physically or mentally, and who reproduce their like. On the other
hand, the conditions are such that even the naturally strong, both
parents and children, develop badly. Doubtless, owing to the constant
elimination of the unfit, the latter--the naturally strong--are by far
the more numerous. There is nothing to show that, if they were removed
in early life to better surroundings, they would not develop just as
well as the offspring of country folk.
[Sidenote: An Evolution that has now Ceased]
The fact that races grow resistant to the ill conditions to which
they are exposed, and degenerate when placed under particularly good
conditions, is decisive proof that offspring are not, as a rule,
innately affected by the surroundings of their parents. No doubt
exceptions occur, but these are amongst the most unfit, and the race
is soon purged of them. Thus European dogs are said to degenerate when
taken to India. But the existence of old-established native races of
dogs is proof that the degenerative process is not perpetual. Malaria
and many other ill conditions are quite normal parts of the environment
of the races exposed to them, and have been so for thousands of years.
Except for occasional unfavourable variations, which are quickly
eliminated, they have long purged the races of those strains that
tended to become degenerate under their influence.
After man--through the evolution of the structures and faculties
which distinguish him from the lower animals, the large brain, with
its accompanying memory, the organs of speech, the hand, the erect
attitude--had achieved the conquest of the earth, his selection and
evolution along the ancestral lines gradually diminished, and has now
almost ceased. At the present day clever, strong, or active people do
not on the average have an appreciably more numerous progeny than those
who are not exceptionally endowed. No modern race is intellectually
superior to the Greeks who flourished more than two thousand years ago.
The brains, the hands, the organs of speech, the erect attitude, have
not altered. Apparently nothing more than traditional knowledge has
improved.
The gradual accumulation of traditional knowledge during prehistoric
times enabled man to cultivate animals and plants, and so to increase
and regulate his supply of food. As a consequence his numbers
multiplied. Areas of country which formerly supported only a few
wandering hunters now afforded sustenance to growing multitudes of
agriculturists, who often dwelt together for mutual protection in
villages. Commerce followed agriculture, towns and cities arose, and
civilisation dawned.
Civilisation implies a dense and settled community, protected from
most of the dangers which beset wild animals, and in which, therefore,
the elimination of the unfit is no longer of the kind that weeded out
the brute and the utter savage. Some sort of elimination does occur,
however, for, even in the most civilised states, multitudes of people
perish in youth, before they have contributed their full quota of
offspring to the race.
[Sidenote: Natural Selection at Work]
We have excellent opportunities of studying this elimination and noting
whether it results in evolution. Indeed, man presents the only instance
in Nature in which we are able to observe natural selection actually
at work. In all modern states statistics are compiled which set out
the causes of death, the mortality from each cause, and the ages of
its victims. By comparing races which have been much afflicted by this
or that cause of mortality with races that have been little or not at
all affected, we are able to ascertain the resulting racial change, if
any. As may be noted by everyone, _civilised people perish, with rare
exceptions, of disease_.
MANKIND’S LONG BATTLE AGAINST BACTERIA
[Sidenote: Resistance of Races to Disease]
We have just seen that every race is resistant to every disease
precisely in proportion to its past experience of it. It follows that
the evolution of civilised peoples is against disease. If any other
kind of evolution is now occurring, no one as yet has been able to
demonstrate it, though many unproved guesses have been made. Mere
alterations in traditional knowledge is not evolution. Children may
derive it just as well from other people as from their parents.
The vast majority of deaths from disease are of zymotic origin. A
zymotic or microbic disease is caused by the entrance into the body of
minute animals or plants (microbes), which find their nutriment there.
There are many species of microbes, each disease being due to one. Some
species are mainly air-borne, and infect through the breath; others are
water-borne; others earth-borne; yet others insect-borne; while a few
pass by actual contact from an infected to a healthy person.
[Sidenote: The Way Disease is Spread]
Some diseases--for example, consumption and leprosy--are of indefinite
but always prolonged duration; others, like measles, are short and
sharp. In the case of the latter, for reasons we need not dwell on
here, the body after an attack becomes, for a longer or shorter time,
an unfit habitation for the microbes of that particular species. The
rapid recovery which occurs in these “acute” diseases, indeed, implies
the banishment of the microbes. The air-borne diseases--measles,
influenza, smallpox, and the like, all of that acute type which confers
immunity against subsequent attacks--are very infective, spreading
through a susceptible population with great rapidity. Under favourable
conditions the water-borne diseases also--cholera, dysentery, enteric
fever, and the like--may spread very quickly. Chief amongst the
earth-borne diseases is consumption. It is contracted chiefly in
such dark, ill-ventilated, and crowded houses as are built by the
inhabitants of cold and temperate climates.
The disease-producing microbes are an infinitesimal proportion of the
total number of bacterial and protozoan species. In Nature it is not
easy to find a speck of earth or a drop of water from which these
minute living beings are absent. All decay, by means of which the dead
bodies of plants and animals are returned to the soil, is due to them.
[Sidenote: The Immense Antiquity of Diseases]
It is a safe assumption that the microbes of human diseases have
evolved from non-parasitic species. The niche they now occupy in
Nature is the human body. Two things formed essential parts of
this evolution--first, the microbes became capable of existing and
multiplying for a shorter or longer period in the body; secondly,
they evolved means of passing from one living body to another. The
latter must have been the more difficult process. Under favourable
circumstances several species of microbes--for example, those of
putrefaction, which are ordinarily non-parasitic--are capable of
entering the human body and becoming virulent; but, since they cannot
secure passage from one individual to another, they die out, and
their virulence is lost. Historical evidence renders it probable that
all known human diseases are of immense antiquity, the so-called new
diseases being merely newly-observed diseases. It appears probable,
therefore, that, owing to constant persecution by disease, by continued
survival of the fittest, humanity has grown so resistant that no
species of microbe which has not undergone concurrent evolution is now
able to establish itself as a regular parasite.
Obviously, since the microbes of human diseases draw their nutritive
supplies from man, they cannot persist except amongst populations
so crowded that they are able to pass from one individual to another
in unending succession. When the succession fails, the disease dies
out, and is not renewed, except from foreign sources. Microbic disease
is never contracted in desert places far from human settlements, and
even in modern times it is comparatively rare amongst nomadic tribes,
and, seemingly, was quite unknown in Arctic regions and in many
Pacific islands before its introduction by Europeans. These maladies,
therefore, must have made their appearance only after men had peopled
certain regions in considerable numbers.
[Sidenote: Progress of Sanitary Science]
On the other hand, we have no certain evidence that any
well-established parasitic disease has ever completely died out. The
chances are all against such an occurrence in the past. When once
established as parasites, the microbes, owing to the constant growth
of human population, found a constantly augmented food supply, and
therefore constantly increased opportunities of reaching fresh fields
of conquest. Sanitary science is still in its infancy. Preventive
measures, and perhaps other agencies, have caused the disappearance
of leprosy from several countries, but it is still prevalent in many
quarters of the globe. Contagious diseases have spread very widely.
Earth and air borne diseases have become endemic instead of merely
epidemic. Consumption is always with us, and almost every child
contracts measles, whooping-cough, chicken-pox, and common cold.
Small-pox has been replaced by vaccination, which is merely modified
small-pox. Malaria has spread but little during the historic epoch, but
only because its microbes were already present in almost every place
where the mosquitoes that convey it are able to exist.
[Illustration: THE DAYS OF THE PLAGUE IN LONDON