ix LIMITS OF NATURAL SELECTION IN MAN 191 



Range of Intellectual Power in Man. First, let us consider 

 what this wonderful instrument, the brain, is capable of in 

 its higher developments. In Mr. Galton's interesting work 

 on Hereditary Genius, he remarks on the enormous differ- 

 ence between the intellectual power and grasp of the well- 

 trained mathematician or man of science, and the average 

 Englishman. The number of marks obtained by high 

 wranglers is often more than thirty times as great as that 

 of the men at the bottom of the honour list, who are still 

 of fair mathematical ability ; and it is the opinion of skilled 

 examiners that even this does not represent the full difference 

 of intellectual power. If, now, we descend to those savage 

 tribes who only count to three or five, and who find it im- 

 possible to comprehend the addition of two and three without 

 having the objects actually before them, we feel that the 

 chasm between them and the good mathematician is so vast 

 that a thousand to one will probably not fully express it. 

 'Yet we know that the mass of brain might be nearly the 

 same in both, or might not differ in a greater proportion than 

 as 5 to 6 ; whence we may fairly infer that the savage pos- 

 sesses a brain capable, if cultivated and developed, of per- 

 forming work of a kind and degree far beyond what he ever 

 requires it to do. 



Again, let us consider the power of the higher or even the 

 average civilised man, of forming abstract ideas, and carrying 

 on more or less complex trains of reasoning. Our languages 

 are full of terms to express abstract conceptions. Our busi- 

 ness and our pleasures involve the continual foresight of many 

 contingencies. Our law, our government, and our science 

 continually require us to reason through a variety of compli- 

 cated phenomena to the expected result. Even our games, 

 such as chess, compel us to exercise all these faculties in a 

 remarkable degree. Compare this with the savage languages, 

 which contain no words for abstract conceptions ; the utter 

 want of foresight of the savage man beyond his simplest 

 necessities; his inability to combine, or to compare, or to 

 reason on any general subject that does not immediately 

 appeal to his senses. So, in his moral and aesthetic faculties, 

 the savage has none of those wide sympathies with all nature, 

 those conceptions of the infinite, of the good, of the sublime 



