€hap. IV. 
MANNER OF DEVELOPMENT. 
155 
the ape-like progenitors of man, probably lived in 
society. With strictly social animals, natural selection 
sometimes acts indirectly on the individual, through 
the preservation of variations which are beneficial only 
to the community. A community including a large 
number of well-endowed individuals increases in number 
and is victorious over other and less well-endowed com- 
munities ; although each separate member may gain no 
advantage over the other members of the same com- 
munity. With associated insects many remarkable 
structures, which are of little or no service to the indi- 
vidual or its own offspring, such as the pollen-collecting 
apparatus, or the sting of the worker-bee, or the 
great jaws of soldier-ants, have been thus acquired. 
With the higher social animals, I am not aware that 
any structure has been modified solely for the good of 
the community, though some are of secondary service 
to it. For instance, the horns of ruminants and the 
great canine teeth of baboons appear to have been 
acquired by the males as weapons for sexual strife, but 
they are used in defence of the herd or troop. In 
regard to certain mental faculties the case, as we shall 
see in the following chapter, is wholly different ; for 
these faculties have been chiefly, or even exclusively, 
gained for the benefit of the community; the indi- 
viduals composing the community being at the same 
time indirectly benefited. 
It has often been objected to such views as the fore- 
going, that man is one of the most helpless and defence- 
less creatures in the world ; and that during his early 
and less well-developed condition he would have been 
still more helpless. The Duke of Argyll, for instance, 
insists 81 that “the human frame has diverged from 
81 4 Primeval Man/ 1869, p. 66. 
