356 THE LIMITS OF NATURAL SELECTION 



universally admitted that quantity of brain is one of 

 the most important, and probably the most essential, of 

 the elements which determine mental power. Yet the 

 mental requirements of savages, and the faculties ac- 

 tually exercised by them, are very little above those of 

 animals. The higher feelings of pure morality and re- 

 fined emotion, and the power of abstract reasoning and 

 ideal conception, are useless to them, are rarely if ever 

 manifested, and have no important relations to their 

 habits, wants, desires, or well-being. They possess a 

 mental organ beyond their needs. Natural Selection 

 could only have endowed savage man with a brain a 

 little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually 

 possesses one very little inferior to that of a philo- 

 sopher. 



The soft, naked, sensitive skin of man, entirely free 

 from that hairy covering which is so universal among 

 other mammalia, cannot be explained on the theory of 

 natural selection. The habits of savages show that 

 they feel the want of this covering, which is most com- 

 pletely absent in man exactly where it is thickest in 

 other animals. We have no reason whatever to be- 

 lieve, that it could have been hurtful, or even useless to 

 primitive man ; and, under these circumstances, its com- 

 plete abolition, shown by its never reverting in mixed 

 breeds, is a demonstration of the agency of some other 

 power than the law of the survival of the fittest, in the 

 development of man from the lower animals. 



Other characters show difficulties of a similar kind, 

 though not perhaps in an equal degree. The structure 



