discovery of such vast differences proves, not that they are absent, but that Science is incompetent to detect them. A very little consideration, however, will, I think, show the fallacy of this reasoning. Its validity hangs upon the assumption, that intellectual power depends altogether on the brain-whereas the brain is only one condition out of many on which intellectual manifestations depend; the others being, chiefly, the organs of the senses and the motor apparatuses, especially those which are concerned in prehension and in the production of articulate speech.

"A man born dumb, notwithstanding his great cerebral mass and his inheritance of strong intellectual instincts, would be capable of few higher intellectual manifestations than an Orang or a Chimpanzee, if he were confined to the society of dumb associates. And yet there might not be the slightest discernible difference between his brain and that of a highly intelligent and cultivated person. The dumbness might be the result of a defective structure of the mouth, or of the tongue, or a mere defective innervation of these parts; or it might result from congenital deafness, caused by some minute defect of the internal ear, which only a careful anatomist could discover.

"The argument, that because there is an immense difference between a Man's intelligence and an Ape's, therefore, there must be an equally immense difference between their brains, appears to me to be about as well based as the reasoning by which one should endeavour to prove that, because there is a great gulf' between a watch that keeps accurate time and another that will not go at all, there is therefore a great structural hiatus between the two watches. A hair in the balancewheel, a little rust on a pinion, a bend in a tooth of the escapement, a something so slight that only the practised eye of the watchmaker can discover it, may be the source of all the difference.

"And believing, as I do, with Cuvier, that the possession of articulate speech is the grand distinctive character of man (whether it be absolutely peculiar to him or not), I find it very easy to comprehend, that some equally inconspicuous structural difference may have been the primary cause of the immeasurable and practically infinite divergence of the Human and the Simian Stirps."

Professor Huxley says, on the origin of species

"I adopt Mr. Darwin's hypothesis, therefore, subject to the production of proof that physiological species may be produced by selective breeding; just as a physical philosopher may accept the undulatory theory of light, subject to the proof of the existence of the hypothetical ether; or as the chemist adopts the atomic theory, subject to the proof of the existence of atoms; and for exactly the same reasons, namely, that it has an immense amount of primâ facie probability : that it is the only means at present within reach of reducing the chaos of observed facts to order; and lastly, that it is the most powerful instrument of investigation which has been presented to naturalists since the invention of the natural system of classification, and the commencement of the systematic study of embryology."

The following note appears at p. 109.

"It is so rare a pleasure for me to find Professor Owen's opinions in entire accordance with my own, that I cannot forbear from quoting a paragraph which appeared in his essay On the Characters, etc., of the Class Mammalia,' in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, for 1857, but is unaccountably omitted in the 'Reade Lecture,' delivered before the University of Cambridge two years later, which is otherwise nearly a reprint of the paper in question. Professor Owen writes:

"Not being able to appreciate or conceive of the distinction between the psychical phenomena of a Chimpanzee and of a Bosjesman or of an Aztec, with arrested brain growth, as being of a nature so essential as to preclude a comparison between them, or as being other than a difference of degree, I cannot shut my eyes to the significance of that all-pervading similitude of structure-every tooth, every bone, strictly homologous-which makes the determination of the difference between Homo and Pithecus the anatomist's difficulty.'

"Surely it is a little singular, that the anatomist,' who finds it 'difficult' to 'determine the difference' between Homo and Pithecus, should yet range them, on anatomical grounds, in distinct subclasses."

This essay is concluded in the following words.

"But desiring, as I do, to reach the wider circle of the intelligent public, it would be unworthy cowardice were I to ignore the repugnance with which the majority of my readers are likely to meet the conclusions to which the most careful and conscientious study I have been able to give to this matter has led me.

"On all sides I shall hear the cry-'We are men and women, not a mere better sort of apes, a little longer in the leg, more compact in the foot, and bigger in brain than your brutal Chimpanzees and Gorillas. The power of knowledge-the conscience of good and evilthe pitiful tenderness of human affections, raise us out of all real fellowship with the brutes, however closely they may seem to approxi

mate us.'

On

"To this I can only reply that the exclamation would be most just and would have my own entire sympathy, if it were only relevant. But it is not I who seek to base Man's dignity upon his great toe, or insinuate that we are lost if an Ape has a hippocampus minor. the contrary, I have done my best to sweep away this vanity. I have endeavoured to show that no absolute structural line of demarcation, wider than that between the animals which immediately succeed us in the scale, can be drawn between the animal world and ourselves; and I may add the expression of my belief that the attempt to draw a psychical distinction is equally futile, and that even the highest faculties of feeling and of intellect begin to germinate in lower forms of life. At the same time, no one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between civilized man and the brutes; or is more certain that whether from them or not, he is assuredly not of them. No one is less disposed to think lightly of the present

VOL. I.-NO. I.

I

thor is not content wi mang these riservatums, bet meest

make the following dangerous generalization.

present I believe that the general outlines of said upon that subject may be summed up in

dignity, or despairingly of the future hopes, of the only consciously intelligent denizen of this world.

"We are indeed told by those who assume the authority in these matters, that the two sets of opinions are incompatible, and that the belief in unity of the origin of man and brutes involves the brutalization and degradation of the former? But is this really so? Could not a sensible child confute, by obvious arguments, the shallow rhetoricians who would force this conclusion upon us? Is it, indeed, true, that the poet, or the philosopher, or the artist whose genius is the glory of his age, is degraded from his high estate by the undoubted historical probability, not to say certainty, that he is the direct descendant of some naked and bestial savage, whose intelligence was just sufficient to make him a little more cunning than the fox, and by so much more dangerous than the tiger? Or is he bound to howl and grovel on all fours because of the wholly unquestionable fact, that he was once an egg, which no ordinary power of discrimination could distinguish from that of a dog? Or is the philanthropist or the saint to give up his endeavours to lead a noble life, because the simplest study of man's nature reveals, at its foundations, all the selfish passions and fierce appetites of the merest quadruped? Is mother-love vile because a hen shows it, or fidelity base because dogs possess it?"

Here follows "A succinct History of the Controversy respecting the Cerebral Structure of Man and the Apes." The statement Professor Owen made in 1857, that "the posterior development is so marked, that anatomists have assigned to that part the character of a third lobe; it is peculiar to the genus homo, and equally peculiar is the posterior horn of the lateral ventricle and the hippocampus minor' which characterize the hind lobe of each hemisphere," is shown to be at variance with the opinion expressed by most other anatomists. Professor Huxley denies all three assertions, and concludes with the following statement.

"For the credit of my calling I should be glad to be, hereafter, for ever silent upon it. But, unfortunately, this is a matter upon which, after all that has occurred, no mistake or confusion of terms is possible—and in affirming that the posterior lobe, the posterior cornu, and the hippocampus minor exist in certain Apes, I am stating either that which is true, or that which I must know to be false. The question has thus become one of personal veracity. For myself, I will accept no other issue than this, grave as it is, to the present controversy."

We will not enter here into the propriety of inserting these remarks, because we are hardly able to enter into the feelings of the author. At first sight, they appear wanting in good taste; but we are inclined to believe that the author is justified in what he has said. It has been affirmed that this is a personal quarrel, but whatever may be its cause, there can be no doubt it is a most melancholy dispute.