PERPETUATION OF LIVING BEINGS. 129 



he swore at me and cut at and struck me by turns, and 

 at last, when he found he could not shake me off, fell 

 to entreating me to leave go or I should prevent him 

 from escaping, besides not assisting myself, I still kept 

 tight hold of him, and would not quit my grasp until 

 he had at last dragged me through." Here you see 

 was a case of selective saving — if we may so term it — 

 depending for its success on the strength of the cloth 

 of the Cuirassier's cloak. It is the same in nature ; 

 every species has its bridge of Beresina ; it has to fight 

 its way through and struggle with other species ; and 

 when well nigh overpowered, it may be that the smallest 

 chance, something in its colour, perhaps — the minutest 

 circumstance — will turn the scale one way or the 

 other. 



Suppose that by a variation of the black race it had 

 produced the white man at any time — you know that 

 the Negroes are said to believe this to have been the case, 

 and to imagine that Cain was the first white man, and 

 that we are his descendants — suppose that this had ever 

 happened, and that the first residence of this human 

 being was on the West Coast of Africa. There is 

 no great structural difference between the white man 

 and the Negro, and yet there is something so singularly 

 different in the constitution of the two, that the 

 malarias of that country, which do not hurt the black 

 at all, cut off and destroy the white. Then you see there 

 would have been a selective operation performed ; if the 

 white man had risen in that way, he would have been 

 selected out and removed by means of the malaria. Now 

 there really is a very curious case of selection of this sort 

 among pigs, and it is a case of selection of colour, too. 



i 



