VIII 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF HUMAN RACES 
179 
arisen those striking characteristics and special modifications 
which still distinguish the chief races of mankind. The red, 
black, yellow, or blushing white skin ; the straight, the curly, 
the woolly hair ; the scanty or abundant beard ; the straight 
or oblique eyes ; the various forms of the pelvis, the cranium, 
and other parts of the skeleton. 
But while these changes had been going on, his mental 
development had, from some unknown cause, greatly advanced, 
and had now reached that condition in which it began power- 
fully to influence his whole existence, and would therefore 
become subject to the irresistible action of natural selection. 
This action would quickly give the ascendency to mind: 
speech would probably now be first developed, leading to a 
still further advance of the mental faculties ; and from that 
moment man, as regards the form and structure of most parts 
of his body, would remain almost stationary. The art of 
making weapons, division of labour, anticipation of the future, 
restraint of the appetites, moral, social, and sympathetic feel- 
ings, would now have a preponderating influence on his well- 
being, and would therefore be that part of his nature on 
which natural selection would most powerfully act; and 
we should thus have explained that wonderful persistence of 
mere physical characteristics which is the stumbling-block of 
those who advocate the unity of mankind. 
We are now, therefore, enabled to harmonise the conflict- 
ing views of anthropologists on this subject. Man may have 
been — indeed I believe must have been — once a homogeneous 
race ; but it was at a period of which we have as yet dis- 
covered no remains — at a period so remote in his history that 
he had not yet acquired that wonderfully developed brain, 
the organ of the mind, which now, even in Ms lowest examples, 
raises him far above the highest brutes — at a period when 
he had the form but hardly the nature of man, when he 
neither possessed human speech, nor those sympathetic and 
moral feelings which in a greater or less degree everywhere 
now distinguish the race. Just in proportion as these truly 
human faculties became developed in him would his physical 
features become fixed and permanent, because the latter would 
be of less importance to his well-being ; he would be kept in 
harmony with the slowly changing universe around him, by 
