IX 
LIMITS OF NATURAL SELECTION IN MAN 
193 
adopted by field mice and beavers, as well as the sleeping- 
place of the orang-utan, and the tree-shelter of some of the 
African anthropoid apes, may well be compared with the 
amount of care and forethought bestowed by many savages 
in similar circumstances. His possession of free and perfect 
hands, not required for locomotion, enables man to form and 
use weapons and implements which are beyond the physical 
powers of brutes ; but having done this, he certainly does not 
exhibit more mind in using them than do many lower animals. 
What is there in the life of the savage but the satisfying of 
the cravings of appetite in the simplest and easiest way? 
What thoughts, ideas, or actions are there that raise him 
many grades above the elephant or the ape ? Yet he pos- 
sesses, as we have seen, a brain vastly superior to theirs in 
size and complexity ; and this brain gives him, in an unde- 
veloped state, faculties which he never requires to use. And 
if this is true of existing savages, how much more true must 
it have been of the men whose sole weapons were rudely 
chipped flints, and some of whom, we may fairly conclude, 
were lower than any existing race ; while the only evidence 
yet in our possession shows them to have had brains fully 
as capacious as those of the average of the lower savage 
races. 
We see, then, that whether we compare the savage with 
the higher developments of man, or with the brutes around 
him, we are alike driven to the conclusion that in his large and 
well -developed brain he possesses an organ quite dispropor- 
tionate to his actual requirements — an organ that seems pre- 
pared in advance, only to be fully utilised as he progresses in 
civilisation. A brain one-half larger than that of the gorilla 
would, according to the evidence before us, fully have sufficed 
for the limited mental development of the savage ; and we 
must therefore admit that the large brain he actually pos- 
sesses could never have been solely developed by any of those 
laws of evolution, whose essence is, that they lead to a degree 
of organisation exactly proportionate to the wants of each 
species, never beyond those wants — that no preparation can 
be made for the future development of the race — that one 
part of the body can never increase in size or complexity, ex- 
cept in strict co-ordination to the pressing wants of the whole. 
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