59 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and he is all the wiser and happier if he care for none is that of 

 about a dozen men : two or three in these islands, as many in Amer- 

 ica, and half a dozen on the Continent. If these think well of his 

 work, his reputation is secure from all the attacks cf all the able edi- 

 tors of all the " influential organs " put together. So that I do not 

 suppose that Mr. Darwin troubles himself much about this charge of 

 dishonest reticence, which would be so ludicrous if it were not so 

 shameful to its author ; and I have thought it worth while to expose 

 its foolish falsity merely in the interests of the honor of English jour- 

 nalism, in the hope of putting a stop to such malpractices, by calling 

 the attention of the public to the most conspicuous lapse from that 

 honor which has happened within my recollection. 



The book, the title of which heads this article, Haeckel's " Anthro- 

 pogenic," is remarkable in many ways : not least as a milestone, indi- 

 cating the progress of the application of the theory of Evolution to 

 Man, since Darwin set us all to thinking afresh upon that subject. 



The position I took up, in 1863, was a very guarded one, as the 

 state of knowledge at that time demanded. All I had to say came 

 to this : If there is reason to believe that the lower animals have come 

 to be what they are by a process of gradual modification, then there 

 is nothing in the structure of man to warrant us in denying that he 

 may have come into existence by the gradual modification of a mam- 

 mal of ape-like organization. And, of the many criticisms with which 

 my little book has been favored here and abroad, I have met with 

 none which, in the slightest degree, shakes that position. 



Prof. Haeckel stoops at much higher game. His theme is " An- 

 thropogeny " the tracing of the actual pedigree of man from its 

 protoplasmic root, sodden in the mud of seas which existed before the 

 oldest of the fossiliferous rocks were deposited, in those inconceivably 

 ancient days, which, for this earth, at any rate, were the real juvenilis 

 mundi, to its climax and perfection say in an anonymous critic of 

 strict orthodoxy and high moral tone. 



It need hardly be said that, in dealing with such a problem as this, 

 science rapidly passes beyond the bounds of positive verifiable fact, 

 and enters those of more or less justifiable speculation. But there 

 are very few scientific problems, even of those which have been, and 

 are being, most successfully solved, which have been, or can be, ap- 

 proached in any other way. 



Our views respecting the nature of the planets, of the sun and stars, 

 are speculations which are not, and cannot be, directly verified ; that 

 great instrument of research, the atomic hypothesis, is a speculation 

 which cannot be directly verified ; the statement that an extinct ani- 

 mal, of which we know only the skeleton, and never can know any 

 more, had a heart and lungs, and gave birth to young which were 

 developed in such and such a fashion, may be one which admits of 

 no reasonable doubt, but it is an unverifiable hypothesis. I may be 



