of favoured races in the
struggle for life," which leads to the inevitable extinction of all
those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which Europeans come
in contact. The red Indian in North America, and in Brazil; the
Tasmanian, Australian, and New Zealander in the southern hemisphere, die
out, not from any one special cause, but from the inevitable effects of
an unequal mental and physical struggle. The intellectual and moral, as
well as the physical, qualities of the European are superior; the same
powers and capacities which have made him rise in a few centuries from
the condition of the wandering savage with a scanty and stationary
population, to his present state of culture and advancement, with a
greater average longevity, a greater average strength, and a capacity of
more rapid increase,--enable him when in contact with the savage man, to
conquer in the struggle for existence, and to increase at his expense,
just as the better adapted, increase at the expense of the less adapted
varieties in the animal and vegetable kingdoms,--just as the weeds of
Europe overrun North America and Australia, extinguishing native
productions by the inherent vigour of their organization, and by their
greater capacity for existence and multiplication.

_The Origin of the Races of Man._

If these views are correct; if in proportion as man's social, moral, and
intellectual faculties became developed, his physical structure would
cease to be affected by the operation of "natural selection," we have a
most important clue to the origin of races. For it will follow, that
those great modifications of structure and of external form, which
resulted in the development of man out of some lower type of animal,
must have occurred before his intellect had raised him above the
condition of the brutes, at a period when he was gregarious, but
scarcely social, with a mind perceptive but not reflective, ere any
sense of _right_ or feelings of _sympathy_ had been developed in him. He
would be still subject, like the rest of the organic world, to the
action of "natural selection," which would retain his physical form and
constitution in harmony with the surrounding universe. He was probably
at a very early period a dominant race, spreading widely over the warmer
regions of the earth as it then existed, and in agreement with what we
see in the case of other dominant species, gradually becoming modified
in accordance with local conditions.