PDF - Wallace Online

184 NATURAL SELECTION vinBy his superior sympathetic and moral feelings he becomesfitted for the social state ;he ceases to plunder the weak andhelpless of his tribe he shares the ;game which he has caughtwith less active or less fortunate hunters, or exchanges it forweapons which even the weak or the deformed can fashion ;he saves the sick and wounded from death ;and thus thepower which leads to the rigid destruction of all animals whocannot in every respect help themselves, is prevented fromacting on him.This power is natural selection ; and, as by no othermeans can it be shown that individual variations can everbecome accumulated and rendered permanent, so as to formwell-marked races, it follows that the differences which nowseparate mankind from other animals must have been producedbefore he became possessed of a human intellect orhuman sympathies. This view also renders possible, or evenrequires, the existence of man at a comparatively remotegeological epoch. For, during the long periods in which otheranimals have been undergoing modification in their wholestructure, to such an amount as to constitute distinct generaand families, man's body will have remained genetically, or evenspecifically, the same, while his head and brain alone will haveundergone modification equal to theirs. We can thus understandhow it is that, judging from the head and brain, ProfessorOwen places man in a distinct sub-class of mammalia,while as regards the bony structure of his body, there is theclosest anatomical"resemblance to the anthropoid apes, everytooth, every bone, strictly homologous which makes thedetermination of the difference between Homo and Pitliecusthe anatomist's difficulty." The present theory fully recognisesand accounts for these facts ;and we may perhapsclaim as corroborative of its truth that it neither requires usto depreciate the intellectual chasm which separates man fromthe apes, nor refuses full recognition of the striking resemblancesto them, which exist in other parts of his structure.In concluding this brief sketch of a great subject, I wouldpoint out its bearing upon the future of the human race. Ifmyconclusions are just, it must inevitably follow that the higher