hardly equal to those prehistoric
men who represented the mammoth and the reindeer on pieces of horn or
bone. With any advance in the arts of social life, we have a
corresponding advance in artistic skill and taste, rising very high in
the art of Japan and India, but culminating in the marvellous sculpture
of the best period of Grecian history. In the Middle Ages art was
chiefly manifested in ecclesiastical architecture and the illumination
of manuscripts, but from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries
pictorial art revived in Italy and attained to a degree of perfection
which has never been surpassed. This revival was followed closely by the
schools of Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, France, and England, showing
that the true artistic faculty belonged to no one nation, but was fairly
distributed among the various European races.

These several developments of the artistic faculty, whether manifested
in sculpture, painting, or architecture, are evidently outgrowths of the
human intellect which have no immediate influence on the survival of
individuals or of tribes, or on the success of nations in their
struggles for supremacy or for existence. The glorious art of Greece did
not prevent the nation from falling under the sway of the less advanced
Roman; while we ourselves, among whom art was the latest to arise, have
taken the lead in the colonisation of the world, thus proving our mixed
race to be the fittest to survive.

_Independent Proof that the Mathematical, Musical, and Artistic
Faculties have not been Developed under the Law of Natural Selection._

The law of Natural Selection or the survival of the fittest is, as its
name implies, a rigid law, which acts by the life or death of the
individuals submitted to its action. From its very nature it can act
only on useful or hurtful characteristics, eliminating the latter and
keeping up the former to a fairly general level of efficiency. Hence it
necessarily follows that the characters developed by its means will be
present in all the individuals of a species, and, though varying, will
not vary very widely from a common standard. The amount of variation we
found, in our third chapter, to be about one-fifth or one-sixth of the
mean value--that is, if the mean value were taken at 100, the variations
would reach from 80 to 120, or somewhat more, if very large numbers were
compared. In accordance with this law we find, that all those characters
in man which were cer