﻿26 Darwin, and after Darwin. 



intelligence plucking the hair from the backs of savage men 

 (to whom, according to his own account, it would have been use- 

 ful and beneficial), in order that the descendants of the poor 

 shorn wretches might, after many deaths from cold and damp 

 in the course of many generations,' have been forced to raise 

 themselves in the scale of civilization through the practice of 

 various arts, in the manner indicated by Mr. Wallace V 



To this it may be added that the Chimpanzee 

 " Sally " was largely denuded of hair, especially on 

 the back, or the part of " man's organization " on 

 which Mr. Wallace lays special stress, as being in this 

 respect out of analogy with other mammalia 2 . 



Lastly, touching his statement that the brain of 

 savage man is both quantitatively and qualitatively 

 in advance of his requirements, it is here also sufficient 

 to refer to Darwin's answer, as given in the Descent of 

 Man. Mr. Wallace, indeed, ignores this answer in his 

 recent re-publication of the argument ; but it is im- 

 possible to understand why he should have done so. 

 To me, at all events, it seems that one out of several 

 considerations which Darwin advances is alone 

 sufficient to show the futility of this argument. 

 I allude to the consideration that the power of 

 forming abstract ideas with the complex machinery 

 of language as the vehicle of their expression, is 

 probably of itself enough to account for both the 

 mass and the structure of a savage's brain. But this 

 leads us to the second division of Mr. Wallace's argu- 



1 Descent of Man, 1st Ed. ch. xx. (Trans. Dev. Assoc, for Science, 1890). 



3 The late Prof. Moseley informed me that, during his voyage on the 

 Challenger, he had seen many men whose backs were well covered with 

 hair. — For an excellent discussion of the whole question, chiefly in the 

 Light of embryology, see the paper by Buckman already alluded to, 

 pp. 2S0-2S9. Also, for an account of an extraordinary hairy race of men, 

 sec Alone with (he Hairy Ainu, by A. H. Savage Landor, 1893. 



