The first thing to observe in Mr. Darwin's pedigree of man is its extreme length. His most enthusiastic follower, Professor Huxley, once compared it to that which some Englishmen are fond of boasting about, viz., their descent from some of the Norman robbers, who came over from Normandy with "the Conqueror," as James I.'s witty retort to one of the Lumley family shows. He was boasting that he was descended from a certain "Adam Lumley," who belonged to that piratical crew. "Well, mon, I dinna kno that Adam (referring to him who was expelled from Paradise) was a Lumley"! That curious class of speculators, the so-called "AngloIsraelites," declare that the English can trace their pedigree from Abraham without a missing link. The noble French family of Montmorenci boast that their founder was a contemporary of Noah, who preserved the archives of the Montmorencies by taking them into the Ark. A certain Welsh chieftain used to display his genealogical tree to his wondering friends, in

the middle of which the generation of Adam appears, thereby proving the Welshman's ancestors as belonging to the class of pre-Adamites, for which many sciolists zealously contend in the present day.

But after all what are these to be compared to the extreme length of the Darwinian tale, or tail? They are, as the Yankee acutely said, simply "nowhere." Let me, however, do full justice to Mr. Darwin, by calling your attention to what he teaches respecting your primeval ancestor. You observe that in the passage already quoted, Darwin can only obtain "an obscure glance" at this ancestor. And so in another part of the same work he says, "In the dim obscurity of the past, we can see that the early progenitor of all the vertebrata must have been an aquatic animal, provided with brachio, with the two sexes united in the same individual, and with the most important organs of the body (such as the brain and heart) imperfectly developed. This animal seems to have been more like the larvae of our

existing ascidians, than any other known form.*

These primeval ancestors of yours are further described by Darwin as "invertebrate, hermaphrodite marine creatures, permanently attached to a support. They hardly appear like animals, and consist of a simple tough, leathery sac, with two small projecting orifices, placed by some Naturalists among the vermes, or 'worms.' Their larvæ somewhat resemble tadpoles in shape, and have the power of swimming about" (i. 205). Professor Huxley, in his Introduction to the Classification of Animals, says, "They look very much like doublenecked jars. At first sight, you might hardly suspect the animal nature of one of these organisms, when freshly taken from the sea; but if you touch it, the stream of water which it squirts out of each aperture reveals the existence of a great contractile power within."

Professor St. George Mivart, in his

*Descent of Man, ii. 389.

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Genesis of Species (p. 92), will inform you that these "ascidians are sometimes called tunicaries, or sea squirts." And inasmuch as the term larvæ, from which Darwin tells you that you are descended, is defined in the Latin dictionary as nothing more or less than "ghosts, "it is evident, when speaking with due scientific precision according to the Darwinian philosophy, that the germ of the very original parent of the human race is to be found in the ghost of a sea squirt!

Mr. Darwin, while admitting that though he has found for his ancestors "a a pedigree of prodigious length," it is "not of a very "it noble quality," to which you will doubtless give your cordial assent; but when he adds, in the face of Scripture, that "any longer to believe that man is the work of a separate creation" is to adopt the hypothesis of a "savage," you will naturally think who is most like a savage, such men as Bacon, Newton and Milton, three of the greatest intellects which have ever appeared in the world, of whom Cambridge