istic faculty are certainly very
great, even if we do not take the extremes. The gradations of power
between the ordinary man or woman "who does not draw," and whose
attempts at representing any object, animate or inanimate, would be
laughable, and the average good artist who, with a few bold strokes, can
produce a recognisable and even effective sketch of a landscape, a
street, or an animal, are very numerous; and we can hardly measure the
difference between them at less than fifty or a hundred fold.

The musical faculty is undoubtedly, in its lower forms, less uncommon
than either of the preceding, but it still differs essentially from the
necessary or useful faculties in that it is almost entirely wanting in
one-half even of civilised men. For every person who draws, as it were
instinctively, there are probably five or ten who sing or play without
having been taught and from mere innate love and perception of melody
and harmony.[235] On the other hand, there are probably about as many
who seem absolutely deficient in musical perception, who take little
pleasure in it, who cannot perceive discords or remember tunes, and who
could not learn to sing or play with any amount of study. The
gradations, too, are here quite as great as in mathematics or pictorial
art, and the special faculty of the great musical composer must be
reckoned many hundreds or perhaps thousands of times greater than that
of the ordinary "unmusical" person above referred to.

It appears then, that, both on account of the limited number of persons
gifted with the mathematical, the artistic, or the musical faculty, as
well as from the enormous variations in its development, these mental
powers differ widely from those which are essential to man, and are, for
the most part, common to him and the lower animals; and that they could
not, therefore, possibly have been developed in him by means of the law
of natural selection.

* * * * *

We have thus shown, by two distinct lines of argument, that faculties
are developed in civilised man which, both in their mode of origin,
their function, and their variations, are altogether distinct from those
other characters and faculties which are essential to him, and which
have been brought to their actual state of efficiency by the necessities
of his existence. And besides the three which have been specially
referred to, there are others which evidently belong to the same class.
Su