22 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
talons, combined with the wonderful capacity of the hand, leads 
naturally to the fabrication of tools and weapons ; the vast size 
of the brain provides a dormant reservoir of intellectual power, 
out of which every need, as it arises, may be met by a corre- 
sponding contrivance of supply. But all these capacities have 
a reference to the future, and not to the present. In the first 
instance, we see a creature bom into the world weak, unde- 
fended, and unsupplied for the moment, but provided with 
faculties which eminently fit it for a far higher existence in 
some remote ages and under very different conditions. The 
capacities are given first ; the use of them comes later. They 
do not arise out of the pressure of past necessity ; they are be- 
stowed in anticipation of future wants and for the furtherance of 
a future development. But that is the method of final causes, 
which is exactly contradictory to that of natural selection. 
The former looks always forwards, and the latter looks always 
backwards. The one is the method of prophecy, and the other 
of history. The one implies the action of an intelligent and 
forecasting agent, while the other relies wholly on a chain of 
causation — which may or may not have been established in the 
first instance by an intelligent agent, but which, once estab- 
lished, works on blindly and unalterably by itself. This may be 
illustrated by the action of man upon Nature in his own pro- 
vince of artificial selection. When the florist wishes to produce* 
a particular variety of flower or leaf, he carefully selects all in- 
dividuals that approximate towards it, guards them from in- 
jurious influences, secures their inter-breeding, and takes them, 
in short, by his protecting care out of the natural conditions 
into which they are born. The pigeon-fancier aiming at a 
special feather, the poultry-breeder desiring to secure plenty of 
eggs, the sheep-farmer cultivating specially, as it may happen, 
wool or mutton, acts in the same way. In all these cases an 
ideal is first proposed which is afterwards worked up to. The 
ordinary operations of Nature are defied or counteracted by 
special contrivance in order that the proposed end may be 
gained — that the intended type of animal may be, so to speak, 
created. They are all cases, within* narrow limits, of final 
causes, in which man’s intelligence is the causer, and the laws, 
of Nature the unintelligent instruments. Natural selection 
has, in these cases, to bow before the higher power of human 
selection. The inference which Mr. Wallace draws from the 
line of thought which he has developed — and it seems the only 
possible inference — is that some such superior selection has been 
at work in the production of man. Some higher intelligence 
has exercised over the world at large the same kind of control 
which man displays in his farm or in his poultry-yard. This 
superior intelligence has forced the great life-agencies on the 
