THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 631 



of mind. . . . 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 accu- 

 mulated l ; the better and higher specimens of our race 

 would therefore increase and spread, the lower and 

 more brutal would successively give way and die out ; 

 and that rapid advancement in mental organization 

 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/ 



Surely, however, we are called upon to witness a 

 strange perversity of human reason when many of those 

 who have become the heirs of such higher development 

 attempt, more or less indignantly, to repudiate its 

 origin when, on the strength of the high elaboration 

 of those faculties which they have inherited from sim- 

 pler and less polished predecessors, they are now eager 



1 Principally from the inheritance of functionally-induced changes ; 

 for, as Mr. Spencer says (' Principles of Biology,' vol. i. p. 469), 

 ' though Natural Selection acts freely in the struggle of one society 

 with another, yet among the units of each society its action is so 

 interfered with that there remains no adequate cause for the acquirement 

 of mental superiority by one race over another, except the inheritance of 

 functionally-produced modifications.' And, as Mr. Spencer subsequently 

 points out, this view of the case harmonizes well with Mr. Wallace's con- 

 clusion, that ' at a certain stage of evolution the brain begins to vary 

 much more than the body.' 



