Similar results in nations and tribes can easily be supplied from
the great migrations of the past. The wider movements are but due to
comparatively small aggregates of adventurous men, in other words to
the aggregation of many similar central nervous systems. The great
Western and Southern adventures of the Scythian Tribes had many
contributing causes on which the historian has much to say, and they
were physically highly efficient for their new career, but, reduced
to the simplest elements, it was neither their great stature, strong
muscles, flaxen hair, nor blue eyes, but the cerebral constitution of
a comparatively small group of them which brought part of the nation
to the promised land, and left another and large part in their homes
beyond and along the Danube. The subsequent story of the latter may
well be compared with the invaders of Gaul and Italy in connection with
initiative in evolution.
The successive invasion of Britain by Low German tribes in the fifth
century, and the Scandinavian hordes of Swedes, Danes, Norwegians,
Letts and Finns in the eighth and ninth teach the same lesson. The
later condition and development of the Northmen in France, Italy,
Spain, Sicily and Britain have only to be compared for a moment with
that of their races who remained in Norway, Sweden and Denmark and
their descendants, to bring clearly before one’s mind the profound
influence exerted by the cerebral constitution of the original Viking
hosts on their career in their new environments, and, indeed, on the
environments themselves; as in intermarriage with their conquered foes.
These examples have been chosen for the reason that one feature is
common to them all, the introduction of an individual or group into
new environments by reason of the constitution of their brains,
irrespective of the contributing factors. If these be sound analogies
they bear closely on the matter of initiative in the evolution of new
forms of life. The men in question came to their task, in their day,
with a certain equipment of brain derived from many ancestors and much
nurture. Unconscious arbiters of their fate and that of multitudes who
should follow them, they initiated a course of physical and cerebral
evolution of which we can see much revealed before our eyes. The motive
power of their conduct bears a relation to their physical forms that
the engines of a motor-car do to its varied forms of body. The latter
are modified indefinitely to suit convenience, comfort and grace, but
fundamentally they exist and are energised by the former, just as
structure is modified for the performance of function.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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