keeping up of a certain average standard of bodily and mental health and
vigour.

So with selection of variations adapted to special habits of life as
fishing, paddling, riding, climbing, etc., etc., in different races, no
doubt it must act to some extent, but will it be ever so rigid as to induce
a definite physical modification, and can we imagine it to have had any
part in producing the distinct races that now exist?

The sexual selection you allude to will also, I think, have been equally
uncertain in its results. In the very lowest tribes there is rarely much
polygamy, and women are more or less a matter of purchase. There is also
little difference of social condition, and I think it rarely happens that
any healthy and undeformed man remains without wife and children. I very
much doubt the often-repeated assertion that our aristocracy are more
beautiful than the middle classes. I allow that they present specimens of
the highest kind of beauty, but I doubt the average. I have noticed in
country places a greater average amount of good looks among the middle
classes, and besides we unavoidably combine in our idea of beauty,
intellectual expression, and refinement of manner, which often makes the
less appear the more beautiful. Mere physical beauty--i.e. a healthy and
regular development of the body and features approaching to the mean and
type of European man, I believe is quite as frequent in one class of
society as the other, and much more frequent in rural districts than in
cities.

With regard to the rank of man in zoological classification, I fear I have
not made myself intelligible. I never meant to adopt Owen's or any other
such views, but only to point out that from one point of view he was right.
I hold that a distinct family for Man, as Huxley allows, is all that can