Chap. IY.] MANNER OF DEVELOPMENT. 149 



' of variations which are beneficial only to the community. 

 A community including a large number of well-endowed 

 individuals increases in number and is victorious over 

 other and less well-endowed communities ; although each 

 separate member may gain no advantage over the other 

 members of the same community. With associated in- 

 sects many remarkable structures, which are of little or 

 no service to the individual or its own offspring, such as 

 the pollen-collecting apparatus, or the sting of the worker- 

 bee, or the great jaws of soldier-ants, have been thus ac- 

 quired. With the higher social animals, I am not aware 

 that any structure has been modified solely for the good 

 of the community, though some are of secondary service 

 to it. For instance, the horns of ruminants and the great 

 canine teeth of baboons appear to have been acquired by 

 the males as weapons for sexual strife, but they are used 

 in defence of the herd or troop. In regard to certain 

 mental faculties the case, as we shall see in the following 

 chapter, is wholly different ; for these faculties have been 

 chiefly, or even exclusively, gained for the benefit of the 

 community ; the individuals composing the community 

 being at the same time indirectly benefited. 



It has often been objected to such views as the fore- 

 going, that man is one of the most helpless and defence- 

 less creatures in the world ; and that during his early and 

 less well-developed condition he would have been still 

 more helpless. The Duke of Argyll, for instance, insists 81 

 that "the human frame has diverged from the structure 

 of brutes, in the direction of greater physical helplessness 

 and weakness. That is to say, it is a divergence which of 

 all others it is most impossible to ascribe to mere natural 

 selection." He adduces the naked and unprotected state 



81 'Primeval Man,' 1869, p. 66. 



