348 THE LIMITS OF NATURAL SELECTION 
were likely that a character so long persistent in the 
entire order of mammalia, could have so completely dis- 
appeared, under the influence of so weak a selective 
power as a diminished usefulness. 
Man’s Naked Skin could not have been produced by. 
Natural Selection. 
It seems to me, then, to be absolutely certain, that 
“© Natural Selection” could not have produced man’s 
hairless body by the accumulation of variations from a 
hairy ancestor. The evidence all goes to show that 
such variations could not have been useful, but must, 
on the contrary, have been to some extent hurtful. If 
even, owing to an’ unknown correlation with other 
hurtful qualities, it had been abolished in the ancestral 
tropical man, we cannot conceive that, as man spread 
into colder climates, it should not have returned under 
the powerful influence of reversion to such a long per- 
sistent ancestral type. But the very foundation of 
such a supposition as this is untenable; for we cannot 
suppose that a character which, like hairiness, exists 
throughout the whole of the mammalia, can have be- 
come, in one form only, so constantly correlated with 
an injurious character, as to lead to its permanent 
suppression—a suppression so complete and effectual 
that it never, or scarcely ever, reappears in mongrels 
of the most widely different races of man. 
Two characters could hardly be wider apart, than 
the size and development of man’s brain, and the dis« 
tribution of hair upon the surface of his body; yet 
