NATURAL SELECTION INSUFFICIENT TO DEVELOPMENT OF MAN. 21 
proportion. Now the average proportions of the brain in the 
anthropoid apes, in the savage, and in civilised man respectively, 
may be represented by the figures 10, 26, and 32. Is this a 
true representation of the mental conditions of the three ? Is 
the difference between the savage and the brute really more 
than twice as great as that between the savage and the edu- 
cated European ? Mr. Wallace bids us think of the difference 
in mathematical power between a senior wrangler and an 
average Englishman, and then descend from that to the condi- 
tion of a savage who cannot count beyond three or five — of 
the mental wealth and vigour implied in forming abstract ideas, 
carrying on chains of complicated reasoning, and transacting the 
manifold business of law, commerce, and politics in our modern 
life on the one hand, and of the meagreness and poverty of 
savage life on the other, wholly given up to the mere necessities 
of providing daily food — and then say whether the intellectual 
development of the savage is not much more nearly akin to that 
of the lower animals around him than to that of the cultivated 
European. But if so, a large part of his enormous develop- 
ment of brain is simply wasted. He gets no good from it, and 
therefore there is no reason, on the principle of natural selec- 
tion, why it should have grown so large. For natural selection 
can only favour the increase of any particular organ just so far 
as that increase confers an actual benefit in the struggle for 
existence. If the increase of the organ outgrows its use, that 
additional growth is due to some other cause ; for natural selec- 
tion admits no surplusage. 
Nor is the size of the brain the only characteristic in man 
which presents this difficulty. Mr. Wallace applies the same 
line of argument with great ingenuity to the foot, the hand, 
the voice, and, above all, the higher mental faculties. All 
these seem to be perfected and specialised far beyond their 
actual needs in savage man. The upright gait of man, 66 god- 
like erect,” the delicate capacities of his hand, the vocal 
apparatus capable from the first of the exquisite modulations 
which can only be appreciated by the cultivated ear, the moral 
sense, the perception of beauty, the abstract conceptions of 
number and extension — all these seem wholly out of the range 
of the results that can be accounted for by the preservation of 
useful variations. They all point in a very different direction, 
and lead us on to another stage in Mr. Wallace’s argument. 
For it is remarkable that all those peculiarities, which seem, 
like the large brain, to be superfluous, or, like the smooth 
skin, to be positively injurious, to their first possessor, are 
eminently qualified to lead man on to the heights of being 
which he has subsequently attained. The smooth skin suggests 
at once the necessity of clothes ; the absence of claws and 
