sperm whales or cachelots (Physeterida), and the last members are the right whales (Balænidæ). This is evinced by the fact that the whalebone or baleen plates are developed only after the rudimentary teeth have made their appearance in the jaws of the embryo, a heritage from the profusely and persistently toothed ancestors. In the Lemuridæ, the system unites the heterogeneous remains of a collection of animals which, by reason of their prehensile hind feet with their opposable hallux, were regarded as fellow-members of the order of "true apes." The connecting link is not their anatomical constitution-they diverge widely in the form of the skull and in dentition-but rather their geographical distribution, restricted to Madagascar and a few advanced posts of Asia. Undue influence has also been allowed, certainly very unscientifically, to a certain peculiar outlandish impression which they make upon the observer. The constitution of their skull refers them to a very low grade in the scale of the mammalia. If we view them as a whole, they exhibit no general relations with any particular order of mammals, but, according to the individual genera, point to those orders which, like themselves, possess discoidal placenta; the majority of reasons favour the hypothesis that the Lemuridæ now living are the last and little modified offshoots of a division of mammals at one time far more richly developed, and that Rodents, Insectivora, Cheiroptera, and Apes, are twigs of this great branch. The Rodents are particularly interesting, because, in conjunction with stubborn persistency in the very characteristically constituted dentition, accompanied by PEDIGREE OF MAMMALS. 281 several peculiarities of skull, they manifest the most extraordinary power of adaptation to arboreal and steppe-life, to land and water. The Insectivora, although not nearly so rich in species, offer a similar spectacle of adaptations by which their genera have become almost repetitions of the Rodents; and the Cheiroptera (bats), in their most numerously represented division, may be regarded as a side branch of the Insectivora, if they have not proceeded directly from animals resembling the Lemuridæ. In what geological period the monkeys were evolved from lemur-like forms we do not know. The few fossil monkeys with which we are acquainted belong to the higher families of apes, and pre-suppose a long series of ancestors. The same conjecture is forced upon us by the geographical isolation of the American monkeys from those of the Old World, which is also combined with considerable anatomical differences, although it could not occur to zoologists or comparative anatomists to deny their close systematic affinity. The relation of the lower to the higher apes requires further discussion, which we shall combine with our disquisition on the relation of man with the monkeys. XII. Man. WHEN Goethe declares, "We are eternally in contact. with problems. Man is an obscure being; he knows little of the world, and of himself least of all,"78-he almost repeats what J. J. Rousseau says in Emile," "We have no measure for this huge machine (the world); we cannot calculate its relations; we know. neither its primary laws nor its final cause; we do not know ourselves; we know neither our nature nor our active principle." Such and such-like quotations are wont to be made to us as justifying and confirming assertions of the narrowness of our powers of understanding, and of the limits of science. But in Anthropology we cannot possibly attribute any greater authority to the worthy J. J. Rousseau than to a Father of the Church; and to the Goethe, whose casual utterances are transmitted to posterity by Eckermann, we oppose the other Goethe, who in the fulness of youthful vigour, exclaims Joy, supreme Creation of Nature, feeling the power All sublimest thoughts, which lifted her as she made thee, and who conceives the most beautiful organization, as he *Freue dich, höchstes Geschöpf der Natur, du fühlest dich fähig 80 THE DOCTRINE OF DESCENT. 283 designates man, to be in perfect harmony with these sublimest thoughts. Our previous reflections and deductions would lack their conclusion were man to be excluded,—could not and must not all that is said of the genesis and connection of animal being, be directly applicable to the knowledge of his nature also. The repugnance to the doctrine of Descent, the doubt with regard to it, the indignation lavished upon it, are all concentrated on its applicability and application to man; and if the body be perforce abandoned to us, the mental sphere of man is at least to remain inscrutable, a noli tangere to the investigation of nature. A few years ago, it was a consolation to the opponents of the doctrine of Descent that Darwin had not directly pronounced himself with respect to man. Anger was vented on his adherents, who had outdarwined Darwin. To this was added the unfortunate misapprehension that the champions of the doctrine of Descent made the human race proceed from the ennoblement of the orang, chimpanzee, or gorilla—in short, from extant apes. But from the first appearance of the Darwinian doctrine, every moderately logical thinker must have regarded man as similarly modifiable, and as the result of the mutability of species; and Darwin has now told us, in his work on the "Descent of Man," why he did not enunciate this self-evident inference in his first book; he did not wish thereby to strengthen and provoke prejudice against his view. Knowing human weakness, he withheld the conclusion. "It seemed to me sufficient," he says, “in the first edition of my 'Origin of Species,' that by this work 'light would be thrown on the origin of man and his history,' and this implies that man must be included with other organic beings in any general conclusion respecting the manner of his appearance on this earth." Nay, Darwin himself has now gone further, and, to the terror of all who can scarce imagine man except as created shaven and armed with a book on etiquette, he has sketched a certainly not flattering, and perhaps in many points not correct, portrait of our presumptive ancestors in the phase of dawning humanity. Before we seriously discuss this serious subject, we will take leave to quote a more superficial verdict given by a clever essayist.81 "Let us suppose, merely as a joke, that Nature, which we see everywhere advancing from the most simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher, had not suddenly waived this law in the presence of man; that she had not suddenly given up her evolution for his sake; that she had not suddenly begun in him a new creation; but that here, as elsewhere, she had proceeded quietly, gradually, naturally, and that man were thus nothing more than the last link of the interminable series of animals, nothing more than a 'developed ape.' The first thought that would then obtrude itself upon us, would be that the facts were not altered in the slightest degree; that man would remain as he is, with the same shape, the same face, the same gait, the same gestures, the same dispositions, powers, feelings, thoughts, and with the same dominion over the apes as heretofore. This is very simple, very self-evident, but also very important. For it confers on himon man-the powerful sensation that, as he now is, he is a being of a quite peculiar kind, very different from |