mount 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.

We see, then, that whether we compare the savage with the higher
developments of man, or with the brutes around him, we are alike driven
to the conclusion that in his large and well-developed brain he
possesses an organ quite disproportionate to his actual requirements--an
organ that seems prepared in advance, only to be fully utilized as he
progresses in civilization. A brain slightly larger than that of the
gorilla would, according to the evidence before us, fully have sufficed
for the limited mental development of the savage; and we must therefore
admit, that the large brain he actually possesses could never have been
solely developed by any of those laws of evolution, whose essence is,
that they lead to a degree of organization exactly proportionate to the
wants of each species, never beyond those wants--that no preparation can
be made for the future development of the race--that one part of the
body can never increase in size or complexity, except in strict
co-ordination to the pressing wants of the whole. The brain of
pre-historic and of savage man seems to me to prove the existence of
some power, distinct from that which has guided the development of the
lower animals through their ever-varying forms of being.

_The Use of the Hairy Covering of Mammalia._

Let us now consider another point in man's organizat