132 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



on the condition of becoming a new morphological ' species.' 

 But Man's wits and his will have enabled him to cross rivers 

 and oceans by rafts and boats, to clothe himself against cold, 

 to shelter himself from heat and rain, to prepare an endless 

 variety of food by fire, and to increase and multiply as no 

 other animal without change of form, without submitting to 

 the terrible axe of selection wielded by ruthless Nature over 

 all other living things on the globe," 



Again (p. 27) we read : " In spite of the frequent assertions 

 to the contrary, it seems that neither the more ancient wars 

 of mankind for conquest and migration, nor the present and 

 future wars for commercial privilege, have any real equivalents 

 to the simple removal by death of the unfit and the survival 

 and reproduction of the fit, which we know as Natural 

 Selection." 



Yet after all these bold statements of the freedom of Man 

 from Natural Selection, Sir E. Ra}^ Lankester (in a footnote, 

 p. 28) says : " It would be an error to maintain that the process 

 of Natural Selection is entirely in abeyance in regard to Man. 

 In an interesting book, The Present Evolution of Man, Dr. 

 Archdall Reid has shown that in regard to zymotic diseases, 

 and also in regard to the use of dangerous drugs, such as 

 alcohol and opium, there is first of all the acquirement of 

 immunity by powerful races of men, through the survival 

 among them of those strains tolerant of the disease or of 

 the drug, and secondly the introduction of those diseases and 

 drugs by the powerful immune race, in its migrations, to races 

 not previously exposed either to the disease or to the drug, 

 and a consequent destruction of the invaded race. The sur- 

 vival of the fittest is in these cases a survival of the tolerant 

 and eventually of the immune." 



This is not the place to point out the series of assumptions 

 made by Sir E. Ray Lankester in his brilliant description (chiefly 

 imaginative) which he drew for his Oxford audience of the 

 emergence of Man from the stage when, like all other animals, 

 he was under the law of Natural Selection. His own admission, 

 contained in the footnote just cited, that Natural Selection is 

 still at work, and that too in most potent forms, is sufficient to 

 demonstrate the untenable nature of the position which he took 

 up in his lecture, and which is adopted by Mr. Houghton as the 

 basis of all his criticisms of my doctrines. 



