Savages have brains far in
excess of their requirements, and can consequently be educated and
improved. The skull of a prehistoric man found in the Neanderthal near
Dusseldorf is of average brain capacity, showing that in those remote
ages man was very much in capacity what he is at present.
[Footnote 1: It is remarkable that the loss of the hairy covering is
most complete when it is most wanted: the back, the spine, and the
shoulders are in nearly all races unprotected; and yet the want of a
covering from the heat or cold is such that the rudest savages have
invented some kind of cloak for the back.]
It must, however, be admitted that the special difficulties of the
origin of man are not purely structural. We do not know enough of the
Divine plan to be able to understand why it is that there is a certain
undeniable unity of form, in the two eyes, ears, mouth, limbs and organs
generally of the animal and man. Moreover, much is made of the fact, as
stated by a recent "Edinburgh Reviewer," that "the physical difference
between man and the lowest ape is trifling compared with that which
exists between the lowest ape and any brute animal that is not an
ape.[1]" This fact no doubt negatives the idea put forward by Bishop
Temple and others, that if there was an evolution of man, it must have
been in a special branch which was foreseen and commenced very far back
in the scale of organic being.
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