BIOLOGY. 283 



The experimeutwas made in 1867, and was repeated at the first 

 recurrence of the attack in May, 1868, preventing the further 

 development of the attack for that year. — Scientific American. 



NATURAL SELECTION IN THE CASE OF MAN. 



In the '• Quarterly Journal of Science " for January, 1869, is a 

 review, from which the following are extracts : — 



*' A writer in a recent number of ' Eraser's Magazine ' endeav- 

 ors to point out that although there is a struggle for existence of 

 a more or less intense kind, between diflferent races and nations 

 of men, yet that between man and man in a civilized condition 

 there is no such struggle, the weak being protected, and the 

 feeble inheriting wealth which they have not won. Tims the fit- 

 test do not survive, contends this writer, and the law of selection 

 is so far interfered with as to fail, and, indeed, we may expect 

 degeneracy rather than improvement in civilized men.'' 



**The ' Spectator' accepts the view propounded by the writer 

 in * Fraser ' in part, but, making use of the mysterious term 

 * supernatural selection,' asserts that a new source of benefit is 

 opened up to man by the cultivation of his moral nature, which 

 counterbalances any attendant evils. The error in this view of 

 the case arises from a neglect of the fact that civilized man is a 

 social animal, in a truly zoological sense. There is no struggle 

 for existence between the various bees of a hive, nor among the 

 polyps of a polypidom ; the struggle is between hive and hive, 

 and polypidom and polypidom. So with the communities of civ- 

 ilized men ; the struggle is between one society and another, 

 whatever may be the bond uniting such society; and in the 

 far distant future we can see no end to the possible combinations 

 of societies which may arise amongst men, and by their emula- 

 tion tend to his development. Moral qualities, amongst the 

 others thus developed in the individual, necessarily arise in socie- 

 ties of men, and are naturally selected, being a source of strength 

 to the community which has them most developed ; and there is 

 no excuse for speaking of a failure of Darwin's law, or of * super- 

 natural selection.' We must remember what Alfred Wallace has 

 insisted upon most rightly, that in man development does not 

 affect so much the bodily as the mental characteristics ; the brain 

 in him has become much more sensitive to the operation of se- 

 lection than the body, and hence is almost its sole subject. At 

 the same time it is clear that the struggle between man and man 

 is going on to a much larger extent tlian the writer in * Fraser' 

 allowed. The rich fool dissipates his fortune and becomes 

 poor ; the large-brained artisan does frequently rise to wealth and 

 position ; and it is a well-known law that the poor do not succeed 

 in rearing so large a contribution to the new generation as do the 

 richer. Hence we have a perpetual survival of the fittest. In 

 the most barbarous conditions of mankind, the struggle is almost 

 entirely between individuals ; in proportion as civilization has 

 increased among men, it is easy to trace the transference of a 



