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PROFESSOR PAUL BROCA.

being descended from a

a good honest monkey, to being obliged to avow himself the offspring of certain fanatical enemies of scientific knowledge and progress.

*Professor Broca, of Paris, has developed the above idea in the following terse and eloquent language, the force of which I will not impair by a translation:-“Je ne suis pas de ceux qui méprisent les parvenus. Je trouve plus de gloire à monter qu'à descendre, et si j'admettais l'intervention des impressions sentimentales dans les sciences, je dirais, comme M. Clarapède, que j'aimerais mieux être un singe perfectionné qu' un

dégénéré. Oui, s'il m'était démontré que mes humbles ancêtres furent des animaux inclinés vers la terre, des herbivores arboricoles, frères ou cousins de ceux qui furent les ancêtres des singes, loin de rougir pour mon espèce de cette généalogie et de cette parenté, je serais fier de l'évolution qu'elle a accomplie, de l'ascension continue qui l' a conduite au premier rang, des triomphes successifs qui l'out rendue si supérieure à toutes les autres. Je me réjouirais en songeant que mes descendants, poursuivant indéfiniment l'œuvre splendide du progrès, pourraient s'élever au-dessus de moi autant que je m'élève au dessus des singes, et réaliser enfin cette promesse du serpent de la Genèse: Eritis sicut deos!" "Sur le Transformisme," P. 2.

PROFESSOR MAX MÜLLER.

59

After all, the question is not whether the theory of the Simian descent of man is palatable, or in accordance with our conventional notions, but simply and solely whether it is true. "Appeals to the pride or humility of man says Professor Max Müller, "to scientific courage or religious piety, are all equally out of place. If it could be proved that our bodily habitat had not been created in all its perfection at the first, but had been allowed to develop for ages before it became fit to hold a human soul, should we have any right to complain? Do we complain of the injustice of our having individually to be born or to die; of our passing through the different stages of embryonic life; our being made of dust, that is, of exactly the same chemical materials from which the bodies of animals are built up? Fact against

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DARWINISM TESTED BY LANGUAGE.

fact, argument against argument, that is the rule of scientific warfare, a warfare in which to confess oneself convinced or vanquished by truth is often far more honourable than victory."

Whatever, moreover, may have been the remote origin of man, we can cheer ourselves with the thought, that for ages he has possessed a history of his own; he has filled the world with monuments of his ambition, skill, and genius; and he is the sole actor in a drama where other animal beings play only an accessory part.

In my description of Man's Genealogical Tree, I had occasion to speak of the

Missing Link," or the absence of the intermediate forms between man and his

* Lectures on Mr. Darwin's Philosophy of Language. "Frazer's Magazine," June, 1873, P. 665.

THE ENGIS SKULL.

61

supposed progenitors, either in a living state or in a fossil condition. In further development of this subject, I would observe, that, in the earliest description we have of man, we find him separated from the highest brute by as wide a gulf as that which now exists between them; the oldest human skulls are not materially inferior in capacity to those of man at the present day, as may be seen by a visit to the Anthropological department of our museums; and Professor Huxley Huxley in describing the Engis skull, which according to Sir Charles Lyell belonged to a contemporary of the Mammoth, says, that "It is a fair average skull, which might have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brains of a savage.

* " Man's Place in Nature," P. 156.

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THE ANIMAL KINGDOM OF

The embalmed records of three thousand years, the figures of animals and birds engraved upon the ancient Egyptian tombs and obelisks, "those hoary monuments of early science," show that there has been no beginning of a transition of species during the long space of thirty centuries. During the whole of the historical period, species have remained unchanged, they are precisely what they were thousands of years ago; there is not the slightest indication of one passing into another, or of a lower advancing to a higher; moreover, each species has manifested in its capabilities, as well as in its organisation, certain indelible peculiarities, which have been transmitted from age to age. There is an entire and acknowledged absence of all evidence of transmutation, and none of the transition points or links of connection between one