46 MAN [CHAP. VIII 



Letter 414 G. Rolleston l to C. Darwin. 



British Association, Bristol, August 3Oth, 1875. 



In the first edition of the Descent of Man Mr. Darwin wrote : " It is 

 a more curious fact that savages did not formerly waste away, as Mr. 

 Bagehot has remarked, before the classical nations, as they now do 

 before modern civilised nations. . . . 2 In the second edition (p. 183) the 

 statement remains, but a mass of evidence (pp. 183-92) is added, to which 

 reference occurs in the reply to the following letter. 



At pp. 4-5 of the enclosed Address 3 you will find that 

 I have controverted Mr. Bagehot's view as to the extinction 

 of the barbarians in the times of classical antiquity, as also 

 the view of Poppig as to there being some occult influence 

 exercised by civilisation to the disadvantage of savagery 

 when the two come into contact. 



I write to say that I took up this subject without any wish 

 to impugn any views of yours as such, but with the desire of 

 having my say upon certain anti-sanitarian transactions and 

 malfeasance of which I had had a painful experience. 



On reading however what I said, and had written some- 

 what hastily, it has struck me that what I have said might 

 bear the former interpretation in the eyes of persons who 

 might not read other papers of mine, and indeed other parts 

 of the same Address, in which my adhesion, whatever it is 

 worth, to your views in general is plainly enough implied. I 

 have ventured to write this explanation to you for several 

 reasons. 



1 George Rolleston (1829-81) obtained a first-class in Classics at 

 Oxford in 1850; he was elected Fellow of Pembroke College in 1851, 

 and in the same year he entered St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Towards 

 the close of the Crimean War, Rolleston was appointed one of the 

 Physicians to the British civil hospital at Smyrna. In 1860 he was 

 elected the first Linacre Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, a post 

 which he held until his death. " He was perhaps the last of a school 

 of English natural historians or biologists in the widest sense of the 

 term." In 1862 he gave the results of his work on the classification 

 of brains in a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, and in 1870 

 published his best known book, Forms of Animal Life (Dicf. Nat. 

 Biography}. 



2 Bagehot, "Physics and Politics," Fortnightly Review, April, 1868, 



P- 455- 



3 British Association Reports, 1875, p. 142. 



