ix LIMITS OF NATURAL SELECTION IN MAN 193 



adopted by field mice and beavers, as well as the sleeping- 

 place of the orang-utan, and the tree-shelter of some of the 

 African anthropoid apes, may well be compared with the 

 amount of care and forethought bestowed by many savages 

 in similar circumstances. His possession of free and perfect 

 hands, not required for locomotion, enables man to form and 

 use weapons and implements which are beyond the physical 

 powers of brutes ; but having done this, he certainly does not 

 exhibit more mind in using them than do many lower animals. 

 What is there in the life of the savage but the satisfying of 

 the cravings of appetite in the simplest and easiest way? 

 What thoughts, ideas, or actions are there that raise him 

 many grades above the elephant or the ape 1 Yet he pos- 

 sesses, as we have seen, a brain vastly superior to theirs in 

 size and complexity ; and this brain gives him, in an unde- 

 veloped state, faculties which he never requires to use. And 

 if this is true of existing savages, how much more true must 

 it have been of the men whose sole weapons were rudely 

 chipped flints, and some of whom, we may fairly conclude, 

 were lower than any existing race ; while the only evidence 

 yet in our possession shows them to have had brains fully 

 as capacious as those of the average of the lower savage 

 races. 



We see, then, that whether we compare the savage with 

 the higher developments of man, or with the brutes around 

 him, we are alike driven to the conclusion that in his large and 

 well -developed brain he possesses an organ quite dispropor- 

 tionate to his actual requirements an organ that seems pre- 

 pared in advance, only to be fully utilised as he progresses in 

 civilisation. A brain one-half larger than that of the gorilla 

 would, according to the evidence before us, fully have sufficed 

 for the limited mental development of the savage ; and we 

 must therefore admit that the large brain he actually pos- 

 sesses could never have been solely developed by any of those 

 laws of evolution, whose essence is, that they lead to a degree 

 of organisation exactly proportionate to the wants of each 

 species, never beyond those wants that no preparation can 

 be made for the future development of the race that one 

 part of the body can never increase in size or complexity, ex- 

 cept in strict co-ordination to the pressing wants of the whole. 

 



