200 PROBLEMS OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 



Man to a To begin with, man himself to a great extent makes the 

 tent rG makes conditions under which he lives. When he learnt how to kindle 

 his own en- fire and how to use it for cooking, the capacity for digesting 

 raw vegetables and fruits was no longer a necessity for him. 

 When he learnt to fashion tools, the further evolution of the 

 hand became unimportant. The Aye-Aye (Chiromys) must have 

 a specially adapted finger for extracting insects from their 

 hiding-places, but man could easily invent an artificial con- 

 trivance for this purpose. The use of clothes made climate 

 comparatively a matter of indifference to him. He could migrate 

 from a hot climate to a cold one and could change his mode of 

 life to suit his new habitat. His naked progenitors, if they 

 migrated to a new clime, had, by the help of the elimination of 

 the unfit, gradually to form a race suited to their changed cir- 

 cumstances. Clothes, fire, tools, intelligence and the power of 

 making new discoveries, in course of time made the human race 

 largely independent of this slow and costly process. The 

 history of man has been the history of his subjugation of nature, 

 of his modification of conditions to suit his own needs, quite 

 as much as, or even more than, of his adaptation to changed 

 circumstances. In particular he has striven, and with much 

 success, to mitigate the incidence of Natural Selection. This 

 is certainly true of the human race generally, though some 

 nations, thinking it not stringent enough, have supplemented it 

 by artificial selection : in this connection everyone will recall the 

 Spartans and Mt. Taygetus. But such things belong to a half 

 barbarous stage of development. Civilised man has put such 

 methods away from him as proper only to unhumanised nature. 

 Mitigation As I have shown, nature works by a succession of crises. At 

 of crises ordinary times there is for a wild animal no struggle for existence. 

 He lives in peace and plenty and is full of superabundant energy. 

 There comes a crisis, a dearth of his particular food, or a hard 

 season, or one of his persecutors discovers him. Now, it is the 

 object of civilisation to prevent such crises. When the harvest 

 fails in a particular country, corn is brought from distant lands. 

 If frost is severe, we pile on clothes and coal. When disease 

 attacks, we call in the doctor and lie up during the time of 



