428 



MY LIFE 



[Chap, 



locomotion, the powerful and opposable thumb, the naked 

 skin, the great symmetery of form, the perfect organs of 

 speech, and, in his mental faculties, calculation of numbers, 

 ideas of symmetry, of justice, of abstract reasoning, of the 

 infinite, of a future state, and many others, cannot be shown 

 to be each and all useful to man in the very lowest state of 

 civilization — how are we to explain their co-existence in him 

 alone of the whole series of organized beings ? Years ago I 

 saw in London a bushman boy and girl, and the girl played 

 very nicely on the piano. Blind Tom, the half-idiot negro 

 slave, had a * musical ear ' or brain, superior, perhaps, to that 

 of the best living musicians. Unless Darwin can show me 

 how this latent musical faculty in the lowest races can have 

 been developed through survival of the fittest, can have been 

 of use to the individual or the race, so as to cause those who 

 possessed it in a fractionally greater degree than others to 

 win in the struggle for life, I must believe that some other 

 power (than natural selection) caused that development. It 

 seems to me that the omis probandi will lie with those who 

 maintain that man, body and mind, could have been developed 

 from a quadrumanous animal by * natural selection.' " 



In a letter to Darwin, written a week later and printed in 

 the " Life, Letters, and Journals," Sir Charles quotes the pre- 

 ceding argument entire, and goes on to express his general 

 agreement with it. 



He then refers to the glacial-lake theory as follows : — 

 " As to the scooping out of lake basins by glaciers, I have 

 had a long, amicable, but controversial correspondence with 

 Wallace on that subject, and I cannot get over (as, indeed, I 

 have admitted in print) an intimate connection between the 

 number of lakes of modern date and the glaciation of the 

 regions containing them. But as we do not know how ice 

 can scoop out Lago Maggiore to a depth of 2600 feet, of 

 which all but 600 is below the level of the sea, getting rid of 

 the rock supposed to be worn away as if it was salt that had 

 melted, I feel that it is a dangerous causation to admit in 

 explanation of every cavity which we have to account for, 

 including Lake Superior." 



