Suppose we take, to start with, a race of hunting savages in the earliest, lowest, and most undifferentiated stage, we shall get really next to no personal peculiarities or idiosyncrasies of any sort amongst them.  Every one of them will be a good hunter, a good fisherman, a good scalper and a good manufacturer of bows and arrows.  Division of labour, and the other troublesome technicalities of our modern political economy, are as unknown among such folk as the modern nuisance of dressing for dinner.  Each man performs all the functions of a citizen on his own account, because there is nobody else to perform them for him—­the medium of exchange known as hard cash has not, so far as he is concerned, yet been invented; and he performs them well, such as they are, because he inherits from all his ancestors aptitudes of brain and muscle in these directions, owing to the simple fact that those among his collateral predecessors who didn’t know how to snare a bird, or were hopelessly stupid in the art of chipping flint arrowheads, died out of starvation, leaving no representatives.  The beneficent institution of the poor law does not exist among savages, in order to enable the helpless and incompetent to bring up families in their own image.  There, survival of the fittest still works out its own ultimately benevolent and useful end in its own directly cruel and relentless way, cutting off ruthlessly the stupid or the weak, and allowing only the strong and the cunning to become the parents of future generations.

Hence every young savage, being descended on both sides from ancestors who in their own way perfectly fulfilled the ideal of complete savagery—­were good hunters, good fishers, good fighters, good craftsmen of bow or boomerang—­inherits from these his successful predecessors all those qualities of eye and hand and brain and nervous system which go to make up the abstractly Admirable Crichton of a savage.  The qualities in question are ensured in him by two separate means.  In the first place, survival of the fittest takes care that he and all his ancestors shall have duly possessed them to some extent to start with; in the second place, constant practice from boyhood upward increases and develops the original faculty.  Thus savages, as a rule, display absolutely astonishing ability and cleverness in the few lines which they have made their own.  Their cunning in hunting, their patience in fishing, their skill in trapping, their infinite dodges for deceiving and cajoling the animals or enemies that they need to outwit, have moved the wonder and admiration of innumerable travellers.  The savage, in fact, is not stupid:  in his own way his cleverness is extraordinary.  But the way is a very narrow and restricted one, and all savages of the same race walk in it exactly alike.  Cunning they have, skill they have, instinct they have, to a most marvellous degree; but of spontaneity, originality, initiative, variability, not a single spark.  Know one savage of a tribe and you know them all.  Their cleverness is not the cleverness of the individual man:  it is the inherited and garnered intelligence or instinct of the entire race.