Chap. IV. MANNER OF DEVELOPMENT. 155 



the ape-like progenitors of man, probably lived in 

 society. With strictly social animals, natural selection 

 sometimes acts indirectly on the individual, through 

 the preservation 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 com- 

 munities ; although each separate member may gain no 

 advantage over the other members of tire same com- 

 munity. With associated insects many remarkable 

 structures, which are of little or no service to the indi- 

 vidual 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 acquired. 

 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 

 resard 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 indi- 

 viduals 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 lias diverged from 



81 ' Primeval Man,' 1869, p. 60. 



