BANGERS OF DARWINISM. 69 



the lovers of damnation would insinuate. It is no use for him, himself, 

 to mildly plead that he is no iconoclast, and makes no pretense what- 

 ever to have fathomed the solemn mysteries of Nature. His great 

 offense has been committed, and he is condemned out of the mouth of 

 his enemies to moral excommunication. Curiously enough, those most 

 indignant at the suggestion of an ape-like ancestry are the individuals 

 who are pretty generally admitted to be descendants of quite another 

 species. By these the dangers of Darwinism are proclaimed with un- 

 wearied iteration, and thus the bray of the donkey confutes the folly 

 which affirms man to be an offshoot of some archetypal baboon. 



The author of this " Darwinian Theory Examined " is anonymous, 

 but from the anxiety he shows to be " written down " not an ape, we 

 have no hesitation in saying that he belongs to the Dogberry family of 

 dissenters from the faith of modern science. Under what temptation 

 he first thought of coming forward as the critic of Darwinism, and of 

 speaking so loudly on behalf of the claims of his own ancestr} r , we are 

 at a loss to guess ; but we may at once say that he has made us fully 

 alive to the limitations of the great modern theory of man's descent. 

 A theory which relegates all men to the great monkey family, and 

 makes no account of those who confidently establish and vindicate a 

 descent from the four-footed companion of Balaam, must be defective 

 somewhere, as our anonymous author shows. With a charming co- 

 herence, he compares Darwinism to phrenology, and again to mesmer- 

 ism, and again to what he calls phrenomesmerism. " None of these," he 

 says, " could have sprung from nothing (sic) that was reasonable ; they 

 all held on by the skirts of truth, and they have all had their hour of 

 triumph " ; and he continues, " Every one of a certain age may remem- 

 ber how phrenology flourished, how people hired servants, selected as- 

 sociates, and so forth, by its rules." We ourselves are of a certain 

 age, but we really don't remember so much ; and the period when 

 people " hired servants " and " selected associates " by feeling their 

 bumps must have been previous to our editorial infancy. There is now 

 a danger, we presume, that people may do such things by the rules of 

 Darwinism, but the author fails to inform us whether we are likely to 

 " select " servants and intimate friends because they do, or because 

 they do not, present in their faces and on their persons indications of 

 their apely origin ? As to the common results of the theory, however, 

 he is far more explicit, and the case that he reports is so awful that We 

 hope all our readers will take warning. " A man," he says, " was lately 

 reported in America as giving a lecture, at the close of which he had 

 advertised his intention to destroy himself. The audience was consid- 

 erable. . . . Having concluded a most interesting discourse, he, in com- 

 pliance with his advertised intention, before any one could interfere, 

 drew a pistol out of his pocket and blew his brains out. At his lodg- 

 ing was found a will, leaving all his property to purchase the works 

 of Darwin, Tyndall, and Huxley for the public library of the district." 



