1890.] From Brute to Man. 343 
becoming man. Could we behold the species of ape which, 
in the opinion of evolutionists, was his ancestor, we should 
probably be able to discover no important differences in form. 
The change has been in the brain, not in the body. The trans- 
forming influences acted upon the organ of the mind, not upon 
the organs of physical life. The brain has yielded to these forces, 
not by varying in form, but by increasing in size, and by a special 
expansion of that portion of it devoted to intellectual activity. 
This great increase in the size of the brain, with the accompany- 
ing remarkable unfoldment of the mental powers, certainly indi- 
cated the action of very vigorous and long-continued transforming 
- influences; which, if we may judge from the mental stagnation 
of the present ape and savage, no longer exist. 
It is true that the mental organism may be far more plastic 
than the body, and that no time relations between the development 
of the intellect and of the physical structure can be drawn. 
Transformation, under influences of equal potency, may possibly 
be produced more rapidly in the one case than in the other. An 
extraordinary development has taken place in the human intellect 
within a few thousands or tens of thousands of years, yielding 
the difference that now exists between the cultivated European 
and the debased savage, and which perhaps equals that between 
the latter and the ape. If, therefore, it can be shown that influ- 
ences were at work upon original man as powerful as those that 
have produced civilization, we shall have done something towards 
showing how the ape brain may, in a comparatively Jimited period, 
have become the brain of man. 
The leading causes of the development of civilized man are 
not at all difficult to discover. Undoubtedly the most potent 
among them was the influence of warfare, the struggle be- 
tween man and man on the one hand, and between man and the 
conditions of soil and climate in the colder latitudes on the 
other hand. More recently competition in commerce and indus- 
try has taken the place of the warlike struggle for existence, and 
the contest for wealth and position is continuing the effect which 
the contest for life produced. Hostility between man and nature, 
and between man and man, has for ages been invigorating the 
