Thus man, by the mere capacity of clothing himself, and making weapons and tools, has taken away from nature that power of slowly but permanently changing the external form and structure, in accordance with changes in the external world, which she exercises over all other animals. As the competing races by which they are surrounded, the climate, the vegetation, or the animals which serve them for food, are slowly changing, they must undergo a corresponding change in their structure, habits, and constitution, to keep them in harmony with the new conditions—to enable them to live and maintain their numbers. But man does this by means of his intellect alone, the variations of which enable him, with an unchanged body, still to keep in harmony with the changing universe.
There is one point, however, in which nature will still act upon him as it does on animals, and, to some extent, modify his external characters. Mr. Darwin has shown, that the colour of the skin is correlated with constitutional peculiarities both in vegetables and animals, so that liability to certain diseases 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 form 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 no 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”