THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



FEBRTJARY, 1879, 



DARWIN VS. GALIANI.' 



By Professor EMIL DU BOIS-EEYMOND, 

 of the university of berlin. 



IT was a hundred years ago, in the salofi of the Grand-Val, after 

 dinner. Here was assembled that fastidious company of wits as 

 well known to us through the letters of Diderot to Mademoiselle Voland 

 as though we, too, had been guests under Holbach's roof. There was 

 Diderot himself, the most German-like of Frenchmen, and Grimm, the 

 most Frenchy of Germans ^ ; that peevish Scot, Hoop, and the little 

 Neapolitan abbe, Galiani,' in whom playfulness and levity often con- 

 cealed profound thinking. There, too, were those women whose re- 

 doubtable charms are immortalized in Rousseau's " Confessions," as 

 those of Helen in the " Hiad " and " Odyssey." 



The fortunate ones of this world had then a good time, especially 

 in France. The trammels of superstition which for seventeen centu- 

 ries had made slaves of the human race seemed to have been burst 

 asunder. The sun of a cloudless day was illumining and warming the 

 intellectual world ; while on the other side of the Atlantic the dawn of 

 popular freedom and human dignity was beginning to appear. Des- 

 potism in church and state was tottering before assaults which daily 



' Translated from the German, by J. Fitzgerald, A. M. 



2 Sainte-Beuve, " Causeries du Lundi," third edition, vol. ii., 1858, p. 203. 



2 Ferdinand Galiani was a native of the province of Abruzzo, Naples, born in 1728. 

 He was no less remarkable for wit than for solid acquirements. Having made a collec- 

 tion of specimens of the volcanic products of Vesuvius he sent them to the Pope in a 

 box thus labeled, " Beatissime pater, fac ut lapides isti panes fiant " (i. e.. Most Holy 

 Father, command that these stones be made bread) ; in answer to which the Pope gave 

 him the canonry of Amalfi, with four hundred ducats per annum. He wrote a treatise 

 on " Money," " Annotations upon Horace," " Dialogues on the Corn Trade," etc. He held 

 several important offices under the Neapolitan Government, and died, greatly esteemed, in 

 1787. — (Gates's " Biographical Dictionary.") 

 VOL. XIV. — 27 



