674 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



whether the ideas which Darwin has put forward in regard to the 

 animal world are capable of being applied in the same sense and 

 to the same extent to man. That question, I need not say, is not 

 answered. 



It is a vast and difficult question, and one for which a complete 

 answer may possibly be looked for in the next century ; but the method 

 of inquiry is understood ; and the mode in which the materials are now 

 being accumulated bearing on that inquiry, the processes by which 

 results are now obtained, and the observation of these phenomena, 

 lead to the belief that the problem also, some day or other, will be 

 solved. In what sense I cannot tell you. I have my own notion about 

 it, but the question for the future is the attainment, by scientific pro- 

 cesses and methods, of the solution of that question. If you ask me 

 what has been done within the last twenty-one years toward this object, 

 or rather toward clearing the ground in the direction of obtaining a 

 solution, I don't know that I could lay my hand upon much of a very 

 definite character except as to methods of investigation save in 

 regard to one point. I have some reason to know that about the year 

 1860, at any rate, there was nothing more volcanic, more shocking, 

 more subversive of everything right and proper, than to put forward 

 the proposition that, as far as physical organization is concerned, there 

 is less difference between man and the highest apes than there is 

 between the highest apes and the lowest. Now, my memory carries 

 me back sufficiently to remind me that, in 1860, that question was not 

 a pleasant one to touch on. 



The other day I was reading a recently-published valuable and in- 

 teresting work, " L'Espece Humaine," by a very eminent man, M. de 

 Quatrefages. He is a gentleman who has made these questions his 

 special study, and has written a great deal and very well about them. 

 He has always maintained a temperate and fair position, and has been 

 the opponent of evolutionary ideas, so that I turned with some inter- 

 est to his work as giving me a record of what I could look on as the 

 progress of opinion during the last twenty years. If he has any bias 

 at all, it is one in the opposite direction to which my own studies would 

 lead me. I cannot quote his words, for I have not the book with me, 

 but the substance of them is that the proposition which I have just 

 put before you is one the truth of which no rational person acquainted 

 with the facts could dispute. Such is the difference which twenty 

 years has made in that respect, and, speaking in the presence of a 

 great number of anatomists, who are quite able to decide a question 

 of this kind, I believe that the opinion of M. de Quatrefages on the 

 subject is one they will all be prepared to indorse. Well, it is a com- 

 fort to have got that much out of the way. The second direction in 

 which I think great progress has been made is with respect to the 

 processes of anthropometry, in other words, in the modes of obtaining 

 those data which are necessary for anthropologists to reason upon. 



