176 NATURAL SELECTION vm 



or freedom from them is often accompanied by marked external 

 characters. Now, there is every reason to believe that this 

 has acted, and, to some extent, may still continue to act on 

 man. In localities where certain diseases are prevalent, those 

 individuals of savage races which were subject to them would 

 rapidly die off, while those who were constitutionally free 

 from the disease would survive, and become the progenitors 

 of a new race. These favoured individuals would probably 

 be distinguished by peculiarities of colour, with which again 

 peculiarities in the texture or the abundance of hair seem to 

 be correlated, and thus may have been brought about those 

 racial differences of colour which seem to have little relation 

 to mere temperature or other obvious peculiarities of climate. 

 From the time, therefore, when the social and sympathetic 

 feelings came into active operation, and the intellectual and 

 moral faculties became fairly developed, man would cease to 

 be influenced by natural selection in his physical form and 

 structure. As an animal he would remain almost stationary, 

 the changes of the surrounding universe ceasing to produce in 

 him that powerful modifying effect which they exercise over 

 other parts of the organic world. But from the moment that 

 the form of his body became stationary, his mind would 

 become subject to those very influences from which his body 

 had escaped ; every slight variation in his mental and moral 

 nature which should enable him better to guard against 

 adverse circumstances, and combine for mutual comfort and 

 protection, would be preserved and accumulated ; the better 

 and higher specimens of our race would therefore increase and 

 spread, the lower and more brutal would give way and suc- 

 cessively die out, and that rapid advancement of mental 

 organisation would occur which has raised the very lowest 

 races of man so far above the brutes (although differing so 

 little from some of them in physical structure), and, in con- 

 junction with scarcely perceptible modifications of form, has 

 developed the wonderful intellect of the European races. 



Influence of external Nature in the development of the 



Human Mind 



But from the time when this mental and moral advance 

 commenced, and man's physical character became fixed and 



