JOHN WESLEY POWELL. 53 



lows are erected. Competition in the struggle for existence is the 

 agency by which progress is secured in plant and animal life, but 

 competition in the struggle for existence among men is crime most 

 degrading. Brute struggles with brute for life, and in the aeons of 

 time this struggle has wrought that marvellous transformation 

 which we call the evolution of animals; but man struggles with 

 man for existence, and murder runs riot : no step in human pro- 

 gress is made. 



"That struggle for existence between man and man which we 

 have considered and called crime is a struggle of one individual 

 with another. But there is an organised struggle of bodies of men 

 with bodies of men, which is not characterised as murder, but is 

 designated as warfare. Here, then, we have man struggling with 

 man on a large scale, and here it is where some of our modern 

 writers on evolution discover the natural law of selection, 'the 

 survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence.' The strongest 

 army survives in the grand average of the wars of the world. 



"When armies are organised in modern civilisation, the very 

 strongest and best are selected, and the soldiers of the world are 

 gathered from their homes in the prime of manhood and in lusty 

 health. If there is one deformed, if there is one maimed, if there 

 is one weaker of intellect, he is left at home to continue the stock, 

 while the strong and the courageous are selected to be destroyed- 

 In organised warfare the processes of natural selection are re- 

 versed : the fittest to live are killed, the fittest to die are pre. 

 served ; and in the grand average the weak, physically, mentally, 

 and morally, are selected to become the propagators of the race." 1 



The second series of essays devoted to the subject of hu- 

 man evolution is based upon the five classes into which human 

 activities are divided and upon the subdivision of these classes. 

 The series is incomplete, but so far as it goes it traverses the 

 ground of the essays of the preceding series, by treating of the evo- 

 lution of individual activities from their lowest to their highest 

 stages. The essays will be enumerated under their appropriate 

 classes without reference to their order of publication, and it will 

 be convenient to group with them certain papers falling outside the 

 evolutional series but admitting of the same classification by ac- 

 tivities. 



Within the province of aesthetic arts are two papers. "Esthet- 

 ology or the Science of Activities Designed to Give Pleasure" 

 {American Anthropologist, 1899) develops a classification of the 



^Science, Vol. XI., p. 113. 



