80 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



men and to the anthropoid apes." But he observes that u although 

 perhaps nowhere distinctly formulated, his (Mr. Darwin's) whole 

 argument tends to the conclusion that man's entire nature and all 

 his faculties, whether moral, intellectual, or spiritual, have been 

 derived from their rudiments in the lower animals, in the same 

 manner and by the action of the same general laws as his physical 

 structure has been derived/' This conclusion Mr. Wallace con- 

 siders to be " not supported by adequate evidence, and to be di- 

 rectly opposed to many well-ascertained facts." 



I will not endeavor to reproduce the whole of Mr. Wallace's 

 argument on this subject, but will present what appears to me to 

 be the pith of it; and I do this with the greater satisfaction, 

 because what is here advanced seems to harmonize with what I 

 have already written in criticising the phrase survival of the 

 fittest. 



Let us confine ourselves, for simplicity's sake, to one human 

 faculty, namely, the mathematical. The problem is, how to pro- 

 duce a mathematician by the process of natural selection. The 

 reader must bear in mind clearly what the theory of natural 

 selection is, as already expounded. It is the survival in the strug- 

 gle for life of those individuals which possess variations from 

 their fellows favorable to their preservation. In order, therefore, 

 that the mathematical faculty should be evolved by the process 

 of natural selection, it is necessary to suppose that those individ- 

 uals, which have an advantage in the possession of rudimentary 

 mathematical faculties somewhat in excess of their fellows, should 

 be the survivors in the struggle for life. The mere possession of 

 this rudimentary advantage must be an aid toward life preser- 

 vation. This in itself is hard to understand ; but it becomes 

 harder still when we bear in mind the rareness of the mathe- 

 matical gift. In our own time it would be perhaps an over- 

 estimate to say that the mathematical faculty existed in any 

 marked degree in one per cent of the population; assume such 

 a proportion to have generally held in human history, then it 

 would be necessary to suppose that these rare specimens of rudi- 

 mentary mathematical ability had some very decided advantage 

 in the struggle for life : but what ground is there for such a sup- 

 position ? Grant that ten men in a tribe of a thousand had dis- 

 covered how to count upon their fingers, or suppose them to have 

 discovered some elementary geometrical theorem, how would this 

 help them when a neighboring tribe attacked them, or when fam- 

 ine and pestilence were abundant ? It is difficult or impossible 

 to say. 



And the same argument would seem to apply to other human 

 faculties, music and all forms of art, writing, even speech. Con- 

 sider speech for a moment as the most universal and most dis- 



