220 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



Despite this, Mr. Wallace has claims to a respect- 

 ful hearing and to serious reply. Fortunately, 

 he would appear to furnish the refutation to his 

 own argument in the following paragraph from his 

 delightful Contributions to the Theory of Natural 

 Selection : 



' From the time when the social and sympathetic 

 feelings came into 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 in the 

 surrounding universe ceasing to produce in him that 

 powerful modifying effect which they exercise on 

 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 influ- 

 ences 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 com- 

 fort and protection would be preserved and accumu- 

 lated ; the better and higher specimens of our race 

 would therefore increase and spread, the lower and 

 more brutal would give way and successively die 

 out, and that rapid advancement of mental organisa- 

 tion would occur which has raised the very lowest 

 races of man so far above the brutes (although dif- 

 fering so little from some of them in physical 

 structure), and, in conjunction with scarcely per- 

 ceptible modifications of form, has developed the 

 wonderful intellect of the European races ' (pp. 316, 

 317, Second Edition, 1871). 



