MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE.* THE work before us consists of

three admirable essays on sub- jects which, at a first glance, might seem insufficiently related to each other. We may therefore premise our remarks by stating that the connection between them is to be found in the author's adoption of the theory of "natural selection," first advanced in 1858 by Messrs. Darwin and Wallace. With this clue given, it will not be difficult for any one to follow the idea which links them together, though the idea is less expressed than left to be understood.

With a zeal pardonable in a naturalist, even if he had not the authority of Pope's well-known lice- " The proper study of mankind is man,"

Professor Huxley boldly asserts that

"The question of questions for mankind—the problem which under- lies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other—is the ascertainment of the place which man occupies in nature, and of his re- lation to the universe of things. Whence our race has come ; what are the limits of our power over nature, and of nature's power over us ; to what goal we are tendinn. ; are the problems which present themselves anew and with undiminished interest to every man born into the world. Most of us, shrinking from the difficulties and dangers which beset the seeker after original answers to these riddles, are contented to ignore them altogether, or to smother the investigating spirit under the feather- bed of respected and respectable tradition. But, in every age, one or two restless spirits, blessed with that constructive genius which can only build on a secure foundation, or cursed with the mere spirit of scepticism, are unable to follow in the well-worn and comfortable track of their forefathers and contemporaries, and, unmindful of thorns and stumbling-blocks, strike out into paths of their own. The sceptics end in the infidelity which asserts the problem to be insoluble, or in the atheism which denies the existence of any orderly progress and govern- ance of things ; the men of genius propound solutions which grow into systems of theology or philosophy, or, veiled in musical language which suggests more than it asserts, take the shape of the poetry of an epoch."

(p. 571 58-) To the general reader, however, the less abstract parts of this volume will present the greatest interest, and especially the discussions on various questions which have of late been more or less brought before the public—time credibility of M. Du Chaillu, and his merits as a zoological discoverer ; the moot point whether man is really in structure further removed from the highest of the ape tribe than is the lowest ; and the proper deductions to be drawn from certain ancient human skulls, recently, or not long since, discovered. On the last head we shall say nothing here, the subject having within a few weeks been treated of in this journaht With respect to the first, Professor Huxley gives an able and yet concise account, seasoned with characteristic woodcuts, of what has been written on the natural history of the man-like apes, from Pigafetta's " Regnum Congo" in 1598, down to the present time. The particular animals treated of at length are the gorilla and the chimpanzee of Equatorial Africa, and the ourang-utan of Borneo. He shows that nearly all of what is known about the first named has been before the world some ten or fifteen years, and the popular opinion which regards M. Du Chaillu as its discoverer, or the discoverer of any important facts respecting it, is altogether un- founded.

" If subtraction be made of what is known before, the sum and substance of what M. Du Chaffin has affirmed as a matter of his own observation respecting the gorilla, is, that in advancing to the attack the great brute beats his chest with his fists. I confess I see nothing very improbable, or very much worth disputing about, in this statement.

(1). 53-) So far, then, the supporters of that traveller, as an original observer, will, perhaps, claim a verdict ; but the Professor adds :— "If I have abstained from quoting M. Du Chailltes work, then, it is not because I discern any inherent improbability in his assertions respecting the man-like apes ; nor from any wish to throw suspicion on his veracity ; but because, in my opinion, so long as his narrative re- • Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. By nouns Henry Huxley, FAL& London, 1861. 8wo. Williams and Norgate.

+ Vide Spectator, March 7, 1865., p. 1725, on Sir C. Lyell's Cleabgteal Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.

mains in its present state of unexplained and apparently inexplic- able confusion, it has no claim to original authority respecting any subjeot whatsoever.

"It may be truth, but it is not evidence." (pp. 53, 54.)

This, we apprehend, is all that was ever objected to the state- ments of the Geographical Society's protégé.

There is an old story of a newly married couple, who after the due performance of the ceremony which made them man and wife, went to spend the rest of the day on the water. Their conversation unluckily turned upon an acquaintance who had cut something—it is immaterial what—whether a bit of string or a friend's throat. The bridegroom asserted that the operation was performed with a knife. The bride contradicted her hus- band, and maintained it was done with a pair of scissors. The argument continued, until at length the bridegroom lost his temper, and struck his wife such a blow that he knocked her overboard. She disappeared, and presently rose above the surface, sputtering out in a loud voice " Scissors ;" again he hit her, and again she went under—then emerging, ejaculated " Sciss-ah l" He repeated the process, and a third time she bobbed up, but unable to speak the last word, she extended two of her fingers, opening and shutting them so as to express the motion of the useful article whose agency, in the sectatm7 opera- tion under dispute, she had espoused. As she did this, she sank once more beneath the waves, which closed for ever over her head.

Such a controversy is now going on in the natural-history world. The two most gifted zoological lecturers in the metro- polis have for several years past been amiably engaged in flatly contradicting one another on one or more points of fact. Pro- fessor Huxley has hardly yet administered the coup de grace to his opponent, and Professor Owen has scarcely yet been driven by exhaustion to dumb-show ; but it must come to this termina- tion before long. Meanwhile the spectacle is not very edifying. The present Hunteriau lecturer has the advantage over his pre- decessor, inasmuch as he is able to cite the authority of many other anatomists of real standing in the scientific world who support his views. On the other hand, his rival appeals indeed to other observers ; but they repudiate their former evidence. The superintendent of the Natural History Department in the British Musuem puts Mynheers Vanderkolk and Vrolik into the witness- box ; but they seize the opportunity of saying that their former testimony was founded on misapprehension. Professor Owen again brought up the subject at the last meeting of the British Associa- tion, and in so doing omitted to explain or even to refer to this fact, or to refute the recent statements of other and younger labourers in the same field, with anything more than a general though unqualified denial, declining to give categorical answers to his objectors. As a natural consequence, bard words, and harder imputations—were uttered, and there the matter rests—a quarrel the reverse of what is called, except in irony, pretty.

Professor Huxley's second essay is devoted to this dispute. We cannot refrain from congratulating him on the lucid terms in which he treats " The Relations of Man to the Lower Animals." His language, terse and easy to be understood, stands out in bold contradistinction to the well-turned periods, but somewhat mystifying phrases of his opponent. It may be convenient for our readers to state as shortly as possible the points at issue between him and Professor Owen. The latter asserts that the structure of man is such as to warrant his being considered to form not merely a separate genus or family, but a separate order, or even sub-kingdom, from the apes. In other words, that there is as much structural difference between man and the gorilla or chimpanzee, as between a kangaroo and a sloth, a dog and a pig, and he grounds his belief on certain alleged differences in the form and proportions of the hinder parts of the brain. Now all these differences the Hunterian lecturer declares to exist only in Mr. Owen's imagination, and we confess that the case, as Mr. Huxley puts it, appears to be made out.

It would be impossible here to go more deeply into the matter. The author's final conviction is stated to be that, instead of the structural differences between man and the man-like apes com- pelling us to separate them into two distinct orders, they yet certainly justify our regarding the former as constituting a family apart from the latter, and thus he defends the sagacious foresight of Linnaeus, the great law-giver of systematic zoology, to whose conclusions a century of anatomical research brings us back. Pro- fessor Huxley accordingly proposes the retention of the great Swede's order primates, which he asserts to be divisible into seven families of about equal systematic value. The first of these contains man alone ; next is the group of the old-world

monkeys ; thirdly, the monkeys of America ; fourthly, the marmozets ; fifthly, the lemurs ; then the aye-aye and the gale'o- pithecus, which curious animals stand per se, each of itself forming a single division.

"Perhaps no order of mammals presents us with so extraordinary a series of gradations as this—leading us insensibly from the crown and summit of the animal creation down to creatures from which there is but a step, as it seems, to the lowest, smallest, and least intelligent of the placental mammalia. It is as if nature herself had foreseen the arro- gance of man, and, with Roman severity, had provided that his intellect, by its very triumphs, should call into prominence the slaves, admonish- ing the conqueror that he is but dust." (p. 105.)

Professor Huxley frankly admits the repugnance with which the majority of his readers are likely to meet the conclusions to which the most careful and conscientious study have led him. "But," he says, "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 hippo- campus minor." He proceeds to say :— " 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/roes them or not, he is assuredly not of them. No one is less disposed to think lightly of the present dignity, or despair- ingly of the future hopes, of the only consciously intelligent denizen of this world.

"We are, indeed, told by those who assume authority in these matters that the two sets of opinions are incompatible, and that the belief in the unity of 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 pro- bability, 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, or 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 ?" (pp. 110, 111.) And again :— "Nay, more, thoughtful men' once escaped from the blinding in- fluences of traditional prejudice, will find in the lowly stock whence man has sprung the best evidence of the splendour of his capacities ; and will discern in his long progress through the past a reasonable ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler future." (p. 111.)

Further on, after speaking of the change which reflection on

geological forces produces in the mind of a traveller gazing, for- the first time, on Alpine scenery, the professor adds :— " And after passion and prejudice have died away, the same result will attend the teachings of the naturalist respecting that great Alps and Andes of the living world—Han. Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge, that man is, in sub- stance and in structure, one with the brutes ; for he alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech, whereby, in the secular period of his existence, he has slowly accumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of every individual life in other animals; so that now he stands raised upon it as on a mountain top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the Infinite Source of Truth." (pp. 111, 112.)

Had our space permitted, we would gladly have bestowed a few paragraphs upon the author's remarks, on the Darwinian hypothesis, which, he says, so far as he is aware, "is not in- consistent with any known biological fact." (p. 107.) But here we should be unable to do them justice ; we will, therefore, conclude by quoting, from a paper not long since published by Professor Rolleston,f a passage which we hope our readers may agree with us in considering to the point.

"The principles of the idealist teach him that the difference which exists between the soul of man and the life of the beast which perishes is not one which can be weighed or measured, be drawn or figured, be calculated in inches or ounces. He fearlessly acknowledges that the anatomical truth in this matter lies on the boundary line of the conter- minous positions taken up by Suffon and Professor Huxley respectively; for he feels that yet higher truth is expressed in the golden words but recently rescued from long oblivion :—

"On earth there is nothing great but man ; In man there is nothing great but mind!' "