t specimens of existing humanity.

Our progress towards such a result is very slow, but it still seems to
be a progress. We are just now living at an abnormal period of the
world's history, owing to the marvellous developments and vast practical
results of science, having been given to societies too low morally and
intellectually, to know how to make the best use of them, and to whom
they have consequently been curses as well as blessings. Among civilized
nations at the present day, it does not seem possible for natural
selection to act in any way, so as to secure the permanent advancement
of morality and intelligence; for it is indisputably the mediocre, if
not the low, both as regards morality and intelligence, who succeed best
in life and multiply fastest. Yet there is undoubtedly an advance--on
the whole a steady and a permanent one--both in the influence on public
opinion of a high morality, and in the general desire for intellectual
elevation; and as I cannot impute this in any way to "survival of the
fittest," I am forced to conclude that it is due, to the inherent
progressive power of those glorious qualities which raise us so
immeasurably above our fellow animals, and at the same time afford us
the surest proof that there are other and higher existences than
ourselves, from whom these qualities may have been derived, and towards
whom we may be ever tending.

X.

THE LIMITS OF NATURAL SELECTION AS APPLIED TO MAN.

Throughout this volume I have endeavoured to show, that the known laws
of variation, multiplication, and heredity, resulting in a "struggle for
existence" and the "survival of the fittest," have probably sufficed to
produce all the varieties of structure, all the wonderful adaptations,
all the beauty of form and of colour, that we see in the animal and
vegetable kingdoms. To the best of my ability I have answered the most
obvious and the most often repeated objections to this theory, and have,
I hope, added to its general strength, by showing how colour--one of the
strongholds of the advocates of special creation--may be, in almost all
its modifications, accounted for by the combined influence of sexual
selection and the need of protection. I have also endeavoured to show,
how the same power which has modified animals has acted on man; and
have, I believe, proved that, as soon as the human intellect became
developed above a certain low stage, man's body would cease to be
materially affected