The fact that the physical characteristics of the Australians are substantially those of the Caucasian race in its lowest types has led me to conclude that these interesting people may have been descended from much more civilised remote ancestors, and are thus an example of degradation rather than of survival.[34:A] [34:A] See my _Australia and New Zealand_, Chap. V., "The Australian Aborigines," where this view was first set forth. (Stanford, 1893.) For cases of _morality_ among savages see my _Natural Selection and Tropical Nature_, pp. 199-201. Many other illustrations of both intelligence and morality are met with among savage races in all parts of the world; and these, taken as a whole, show a substantial identity of human character, both moral and emotional, with no marked superiority in any race or country. In intellect, where the greatest advance is supposed to have occurred, this may be wholly due to the cumulative effect of successive acquisitions of knowledge handed down from age to age. Euclid and Archimedes were probably the equals of any of our greatest mathematicians of to-day, while the architecture of Greece, of India, and of Central America is little inferior to mediæval Gothic. But none of these, though so different in style, can be said to prove any real advance in intellectual power from that of the builders of the much more ancient temples and pyramids of Egypt. This latter country, too, in its high material civilisation and its remarkable religious system, shows itself the equal of any that has succeeded it. CHAPTER VII A SELECTIVE AGENCY NEEDED TO IMPROVE CHARACTER The general result of the facts and arguments now set forth in the merest outline leads us to conclude that there has been no definite advance of morality from age to age, and that even the lowest races, at each period, possessed the same intellectual and moral nature as the higher. The manifestations of this essentially human nature in habits and conduct were often very diverse, in accordance with diversities of the social and moral environment. This is quite in accordance with the now well-established doctrine that the essential character of man, intellectual, emotional, and moral, is inherent in him from birth; that it is subject to great variation from individual to individual; and that its manifestations in conduct can be modified in a very high degree by the influence of public opinion and systematic teaching. These latter changes, however, are _not_ hereditary, and it follows that no definite advance in morals can occur in any race _unless there is some selective or segregative agency at work_.