X. THE LIMITS OF NATURAL SELECTION AS APPLIED TO MAN.

Intellect of Savages and of Animals compared.—Let us now compare the intellectual wants of the savage, and the actual amount of intellect he exhibits, with those of the higher animals. Such races as the Andaman Islanders, the Australians, and the Tasmanians, the Digger Indians of North America, or the natives of Fuegia, pass their lives so as to require the exercise of few faculties not possessed in an equal degree by many animals. In the mode of capture of game or fish, they by no means surpass the ingenuity or forethought of the jaguar, who drops saliva into the water, and seizes the fish as they come to eat it; or of wolves and jackals, who hunt in packs; or of the fox, who buries his surplus food till he requires it. The sentinels placed by antelopes and by monkeys, and the various modes of building 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, enable 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 possesses, as we have seen, a brain vastly superior to theirs in size and complexity; and this brain gives him, in an undeveloped 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.