April. 1897. HUMAN EVOLUTION. 243 



in my original article, " natural selection is selection by death " — and 

 save for variations affecting fecundity, I fail to see how this greater 

 amplitude of variation (if it obtain) can affect the average product in 

 the case of civilised man. And " another potent cause of variation," 

 he reminds me, " is cross breeding." But the very readiness in 

 racial interbreeding which increases man's tendency to vary, 

 interferes with that process of segregation which (under conditions of 

 general security) is so necessary to the establishment of variations. 

 Neither of these considerations really affects my essential argument of 

 the average man's present stability as far as natural selection goes, and, 

 since Mr. Coste advances no other matter, I do not see that I need deal 

 further with his culminating statement of man's " wonderful plasticity," 

 except by putting a flat denial to his flat assertion. To my mind a great 

 rapidity of multitudinous reproduction must necessarily be the first 

 factor in the estimate of specific plasticity — the ability that is of a 

 species to weather an unexpected cape in the shore-line of circum- 

 stance. And we must always remember in discussions of this nature 

 that our discrimination of differences between our fellow men must 

 necessarily be vastly greater than between animals, and that, in 

 clothing and other material, man has an incalculable means of 

 accentuating idiosyncrasy. 



Setting aside this issue of relative variability Mr. Coste proceeds 

 to a general attack upon my arguments, an attack based upon the 

 confusion between the intension and extension of the word " man " to 

 which I have already alluded. He begins by stating that my con- 

 clusion " that each of us at birth is scarcely distinguishable, mentally 

 and morally, from Palaeolithic Man, necessarily implies ..." and 

 he presents a dilemma. But I said nothing of "each of us," and with 

 that his main case against me effectually collapses. I am quite 

 prepared to admit that there are children born in each human genera- 

 tion to-day, potentially viler, more angelic, more stupid, more intel- 

 lectual, more bestial, than there were born in an average generation 

 of the later Stone Age. I think it will be apparent that Mr. Coste 

 does not hit me, because he does not clearly see where I am. But 

 that he does not do so is, I think, as much my fault as his, inasmuch 

 as I did not make it clearly evident that I was dealing with the specific 

 type. 



I may perhaps take this opportunity of restating my view, which 

 is that, allowing foy changes in the numerical ratio of races, the average man 

 is still mentally, morally, and physically what he was during the later 

 Palaeolithic Period. I would accentuate " later," because the stage I 

 intend presents man already with speech, a rudimentary family 

 organisation, agricultural beginnings, a wide distribution and there- 

 with the main lines of racial differentiation. From that stage his 

 history has been a history of aggregating communities with a steady 

 fall of the death-rate. Over larger and larger and finally confluent 

 areas natural selection has, I hold, practically ceased her elaboration 



