333 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



edited by Professor Knight.* Those opinions are entirely incidental 

 to his theory of language. Monboddo nowhere discusses the general 

 biological question of the transformation of species, and possibly did 

 not believe in the transformist doctrine as such — so that it is perhaps 

 too much to call him, with Professor Knight, 'a virtual evolutionist, 

 holding an honoured place between Lucretius and Darwin. ' The main 

 contention of his book concerns the evolution of man's language, not 

 of man himself, and is to the effect that language can have arisen only 

 after man had for some time lived in the political state, 'which state 

 is not natural to man any more than the language to which it gave 

 birth.' In order to establish such a theory it is desirable, if not 

 essential, to point to instances of societies of men living without lan- 

 guage; and it is at this juncture that Monboddo meets the difficulty 

 by bringing forward his doctrine about the orang-outang. 



That doctrine is that man and the orang-outang are one and the 

 same species. What the orang-outang is our ancestors were. The 

 orang-outang and chimpanzee are varieties of men that have failed to 

 acquire the art of speech; or — what comes to the same thing, for 

 Monboddo — our ancestors were a community of orang-outangs who 

 succeeded in acquiring that art. It is evident that in such a contention 

 a belief in transformation is not necessarily implied; in fact, in 

 order to establish our descent from the orang, Monboddo seems to think 

 it necessary to establish strict identity of species — thus implying that 

 species can not descend from other species. In the ' Origin and Prog- 

 ress' he explicitly declines to generalize his doctrine. "Though I hold 

 the orang-outang to be of our species, it must not be supposed that I 

 think the monkey or ape, with or without a tail, participates of our 

 nature; on the contrary, I maintain that however much his form may 

 resemble ours, he is, as Linnaeus says of the Troglodyte, nee nostri 

 generis nee sanguinis." In one of the letters in Professor Knight's 

 volume, however, Monboddo writes : "I think the simian race is of kin 

 to us, though not so nearly related (as the orang-outang). For the 

 large monkeys and baboons appear to me to stand in the same relation 

 to us that the ass does to the horse, or our gold-finch to the canary- 

 bird. " What he conceived that relation to be, he does not tell us; but 

 it may fairly be supposed that he was thinking of collateral descent 

 from a common ancestral species. 



Monboddo 's statements of his position, and his arguments for it, 

 are made somewhat ambiguous by the fact that he, like Herder, is not 

 altogether clear as to what constitutes identity of species, though he 

 notes Buff on 's definition, which makes the only test of difference of 



* ' Lord Monboddo and his Contemporaries,' London and New York, 1900. 

 My citations from Monboddo are taken from the second edition of the ' Origin 

 and Progress,' Edinburgh, 1774. 



