356 ' THE LIMITS OF NATURAL SELECTION 
universally admitted that quantity of brain is one of 
the most important, and probably the most essential, of 
the elements which determine mental power. Yet the 
mental requirements of savages, and the faculties ac- 
tually exercised by them, are very little above those of 
animals. The higher feelings of pure morality and re- 
fined emotion, and the power of abstract reasoning and 
ideal conception, are useless to them, are rarely if ever 
manifested, and have no important relations to their 
habits, wants, desires, or well-being. They possess a 
mental organ beyond their needs. Natural Selection 
could only have endowed savage man with a brain a 
little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually 
possesses one very little inferior to that of a philo- 
sopher. 
The soft, naked, sensitive skin of man, entirely free 
from that hairy covering which is so universal among 
other mammalia, cannot be explained on the theory of 
natural selection. The habits of savages show that 
they feel the want of this covering, which is most com- 
pletely absent in man exactly where it is thickest in 
other animals. We have no reason whatever to be® 
lieve, that it could have been hurtful, or even useless to 
primitive man; and, under these circumstances, its com- 
plete abolition, shown by its never reverting in mixed 
breeds, is a demonstration of the agency of some other 
power than the law of the survival of the fittest, in the 
development of man from the lower animals. 
Other characters show difficulties of a similar kind, 
though not perhaps in an equal degree. The structure 
