176 
NATURAL SELECTION 
VITt 
or freedom from them is often accompanied by marked external 
characters. Now, there is every reason to believe that this 
has acted, and, to some extent, may still continue to act on 
man. In localities where certain diseases are prevalent, those 
individuals of savage races which were subject to them would 
rapidly die off, while those who were constitutionally free 
from the disease would survive, and become the progenitors 
of a new race. These favoured individuals would probably 
be distinguished by peculiarities of colour, with which again 
peculiarities in the texture or the abundance of hair seem to 
be correlated, and thus may have been brought about those 
racial differences of colour which seem to have little relation 
to mere temperature or other obvious peculiarities of climate. 
From the time, therefore, when the social and sympathetic 
feelings came into active operation, and the intellectual and 
moral faculties became fairly developed, man would cease to 
be influenced by natural selection in his physical form and 
structure. As an animal he would remain almost stationary, 
the changes of the surrounding universe ceasing to produce in 
him that powerful modifying effect which they exercise over 
other parts of the organic world. But from the moment that 
the form of his body became stationary, his mind would 
become subject to those very influences from which his body 
had escaped ; every slight variation in his mental and moral 
nature which should enable him better to guard against 
adverse circumstances, and combine for mutual comfort and 
protection, would be preserved and accumulated ; the better 
and higher specimens of our race would therefore increase and 
spread, the lower and more brutal would give way and suc- 
cessively die out, and that rapid advancement of mental 
organisation would occur which has raised the very lowest 
races of man so far above the brutes (although differing so 
little from some of them in physical structure), and, in con- 
junction with scarcely perceptible modifications of form, has 
developed the wonderful intellect of the European races. 
Influence of external Nature in the development of the 
Human Mind 
But from the time when this mental and moral advance 
commenced, and man’s physical character became fixed and 
