34o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



used the art of navigation, who had tails like those of cats, and which 

 they moved in the same manner.' This narration is perhaps ex- 

 aggerated, Monboddo admits; but 'that there are men with tails is a 

 fact so well attested that it can not be doubted.' For, setting aside 

 all travelers' reports, and the testimony given by the ancients to the 

 existence of races of homines cau&ati, he himself had known of a Scotch 

 schoolmaster in Inverness who had a tail half a foot long. The man 

 prudently kept his unusual endowment concealed during his lifetime, 

 but it was discovered after his death : — of all of which Lord Monboddo 

 offers to bring legal evidence. The superficial and the dogmatists, he 

 adds, will no doubt think these stories very ridiculous, 'but the philoso- 

 pher, who is more disposed to inquire than to laugh and deride, will 

 not reject it at once as a thing incredible that there should be such a 

 variety in our species, as well as in the simian tribe which is so near 

 akin to us.' 



All these arguments a posteriori are really irrelevant to Monboddo's 

 main thesis about the relation of man to the orang-outang; since those 

 particular ' simian tribes ' with which alone he declares man to be akin 

 (i. e., satyrus and troglodytes niger) are destitute of tails, and have 

 an even more rudimentary coccyx than man. The fact that men had 

 tails would, from his own standpoint, rather tend to show that man 

 and orang belonged to different species, than that they belonged to the 

 same. Of this Monboddo seems to be not unaware, for he introduces 

 his stories of tailed men as a sort of digression, and not as a part of 

 his principal argument. As it stands, his discussion about tails seems 

 rather to resemble the caudal vertebras with which it is concerned — it 

 suggests a good deal, but is not designed to bear any of the weight of 

 proof, and is a relatively functionless appendage to the main body of 

 his theory. 



The comparative crudity and superficiality of Monboddo's specu- 

 lations about the descent of man are one indication of the fact that, down 

 to the end of the eighteenth century, the country of Darwin had made 

 far less progress in this part of biology than had France and Germany. 

 For Monboddo's book seems to be the nearest approach to an assertion 

 of the mutability of species and the derivation of man from animal 

 ancestors which was made by any generally read English writer, until 

 the ' Zoonomia ' of Dr. Erasmus Darwin appeared in 1794. 



