rafts or canoes for fishing or crossing over to neighbouring fertile
islands. He has discovered the art of making fire, by which hard and
stringy roots can be rendered digestible, and poisonous roots or herbs
innocuous. This discovery of fire, probably the greatest ever made by
man, excepting language, dates from before the dawn of history. These
several inventions, by which man in the rudest state has become so
pre-eminent, are the direct results of the development of his powers of
observation, memory, curiosity, imagination, and reason. I cannot,
therefore, understand how it is that Mr. Wallace (67. Quarterly
Review, April 1869, p. 392. This subject is more fully discussed in
Mr. Wallace s Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection, 1870,
in which all the essays referred to in this work are re-published. The
Essay on Man, has been ably criticised by Prof. Claparede, one of the
most distinguished zoologists in Europe, in an article published in the
Bibliotheque Universelle, June 1870. The remark quoted in my text
will surprise every one who has read Mr. Wallace s celebrated paper on
The Origin of Human Races Deduced from the Theory of Natural
Selection, originally published in the Anthropological Review, May
1864, p. clviii. I cannot here resist quoting a most just remark by Sir
J. Lubbock ( Prehistoric Times, 1865, p. 479) in reference to this
paper, namely, that Mr. Wallace, with characteristic unselfishness,
ascribes it (i.e. the idea of natural selection) unreservedly to Mr.
Darwin, although, as is well known, he struck out the idea
independently, and published it, though not with the same elaboration,
at the same time. ) maintains, that natural selection could only have
endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape.
Although the intellectual powers and social habits of man are of
paramount importance to him, we must not underrate the importance of
his bodily structure, to which subject the remainder of this chapter
will be devoted; the development of the intellectual and social or
moral faculties being discussed in a later chapter.
Even to hammer with precision is no easy matter, as every one who has
tried to learn carpentry will admit. To throw a stone with as true an
aim as a Fuegian in defending himself, or in killing birds, requires
the most consummate perfection in the correlated action of the muscles
of the hand, arm, and shoulder, and, further, a fine sense of touch. In
throwing a stone or spear, and in many other actions, a man must stand
firmly on his feet; and this again demands the perfect co-adaptation of
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