178 NATURAL SELECTION vit 
made him rise in a few centuries from the condition of the 
wandering savage, with a scanty and stationary population, to 
his present state of culture and advancement, with a greater 
average longevity, a greater average strength, and a capacity 
of more rapid increase,—enable him when in contact with the 
savage man to conquer in the struggle for existence, and to 
increase at his expense, just as the better adapted increase at 
the expense of the less adapted varieties in the animal and 
vegetable kingdoms—just as the weeds of Europe overrun 
North America and Australia, extinguishing native produc- 
tions by the inherent vigour of their organisation, and by 
their greater capacity for existence and multiplication. 
The Origin of the Races of Man 
If these views are correct,—if in proportion as man’s social, 
moral, and intellectual faculties became developed, his physical 
structure would cease to be affected by the operation of 
natural selection—we have a most important clue to the 
origin of races. For it will follow that those great modifica- 
tions of structure and of external form, which resulted in the 
development of man out of some lower type of animal, must 
have occurred before his intellect had raised him above the 
condition of the brutes, at a period when he was gregarious, 
but scarcely social, with a mind perceptive but not reflective, 
ere any sense of right or feelings of sympathy had been 
developed in him. He would be still subject, like the rest of 
the organic world, to the action of natural selection, which 
would retain his physical form and constitution in harmony 
with the surrounding universe. He was probably at a very 
early period a dominant race, spreading widely over the 
warmer regions of the earth as it then existed, and in agree- 
ment with what we see in the case of other dominant species, 
gradually becoming modified in accordance with local con- 
ditions. As he ranged farther from his original home, and 
became exposed to greater extremes of climate, to greater 
changes of food, and had to contend with new enemies, organic 
and inorganic, slight useful variations in his constitution 
would be selected and rendered permanent, and would, on 
the principle of “correlation of growth,” be accompanied by 
corresponding external physical changes. Thus might have 
