SKETCH OF CLEMENCE ROYER. 697 



not within the province of our sketch to dwell upon any of the bold 

 assertions and hypotheses in it that have been invalidated by later 

 geological discoveries; and, notwithstanding a few errors in detail, 

 almost inevitable in a book of the kind, the Origine de V Homme is, 

 as a whole, a work as vigorously thought out as clearly and generously 

 written. 



Madame Clemence Royer has further occupied herself with special 

 researches on subjects of the same nature. Their results have been 

 published in the highly esteemed review, the Bulletin of the Societe 

 d' Anthropologic The most important of these memoirs relate to the 

 Craniology of the Quaternary Period, the Celts, the Origin of the 

 Different Human Races (1873), and the Domestication of Monkeys 

 (1887). The last work was published at the time of the appearance 

 of a book by M. Victor Meunier,* a believer in the possibility of 

 domesticating the simian race. His proposition, received in France 

 as a kind of a joke, taxed the genius of the Parisian caricaturists, 

 because the author had suggested that newborn children be nursed 

 by monkeys, whose milk was most like that of the human mother. 

 Of course it was an easy subject to joke about. Madame Royer 

 showed how little originality there was in this book. We might, 

 she said, undoubtedly succeed in educating monkeys, and they would 

 at the end of many generations be in certain cases superior to the 

 dog and the horse. Unfortunately, the struggle for existence op- 

 posed the adoption of the Utopian idea. The place for each human 

 recruit at the social table is now too narrow for any part of it to be 

 left for " our lower brethren." 



Anthropological sciences were not the only ones to which the 

 encyclopedic mind of our learned philosopher was attracted. A few 

 years ago she returned to her earlier studies, and collaborated on the 

 Nouveau Dictionnaire oV Economie politique of Leon Say (1891- 

 '92). The most profound article she wrote for this work was that 

 on the word positivism. According to it, the Positive Philosophy 

 dates, not from Auguste Comte, who is believed to have introduced 

 it, but from Bacon; for its essential features may be found in the 

 Novum Organum and the Scientia nuova. Furthermore, Madame 

 Royer found that Comte " emasculated " the doctrine of the famous 

 chancellor. The principal dogma of the system is the impossibility 

 of knowledge of first causes by our reason. This is an error, says 

 Madame Royer. Two distinct ideas have been confounded in the 

 term first causes: first, the permanent cause of phenomena, their 

 essential " substratum," the discovery of which man may perhaps 

 some day reach; and, second, the supposed primary term of each 

 phenomenal law. But if the world is eternal, this last does not exist, 



* Les Singes domestiques. Paris, 1886. 



