l84 NATURAL SCIENCE, September. 



Murrayi, for instance. Nor is this all ; other collections (two certainly) 

 of carefully and beautifully made casts of natives of India have been 

 sent to this country to two exhibitions, and have been allowed to 

 moulder away into dust and destruction. It is these things, and 

 things like them, that take the heart out of men who would be willing 

 to help the museums in every way. The sort of men we want are 

 men endowed with the never-ending zeal of such English represen- 

 tatives as my friend Johnston, the Governor of Nyassa Land, who 

 sends bales of specimens home by almost every mail, and proves that 

 the really condensed essence of human zeal, and perhaps goodness, is 

 only to be found in little men. 



And what lessons shall we not learn from a real anthropological 

 collection ? I do not mean merely in regard to ad captandum issues 

 like the antiquity of man, or the actual links by which the Pucks of 

 our nurseries are united with the Pucks in the Monkey House at the 

 Zoo — these are more difficult questions than many men used to think, 

 and those who know the most about them feel the most mystified — but 

 in regard to simpler and homelier issues, in which it is so much more 

 easy to experiment upon man, whose direct ancestors on either hand 

 we have records of, and whose modes of life are more accessible to 

 study— questions of sexual selection, which has been ridden to death 

 as so many other a pviori theories have by the wild Darwinians ; 

 questions of the fertility of hybrids ; of the persistence of types ; of 

 the occurrence and inheritance of sudden variations, and sports like 

 families of six-fingered or of left-handed men : questions of the effects of 

 environment as apparently exhibited in the production of the Yankee 

 type, with the sharply chiselled face and long wiry hair, so like in 

 many ways to the American Indian ; the effects of close interbreeding, 

 the inheritance of disease, and the effects of the mere struggle for exis- 

 tence, another of the issues upon vv^hich many Darwinians have gone 

 stark mad. A closer study of savage man would have saved some of 

 them from the quagmire into which deductive reasoning generally leads 

 the man of science. The fact that well-fed and healthy animals and 

 plants are generally less fertile than underfed and unhealthy ones has 

 been splendidly shown in the case of man. Then there is that other 

 hobbyhorse of the deductive zoologist, conscious or unconscious 

 mimicry. That butterflies and birds in South America should mimic 

 for protective purposes butterflies and birds in Africa seems a puzzle 

 to an ordinary logician who does not treat post hoc and propter hoc as 

 synonymous. Here again we may profitably turn to the lesson taught 

 by human examples. I do not want to indulge in paradoxes, and to 

 deny the efficiency of many of the arguments used by Darwinians, 

 when duly limited and when duly restrained. No doubt the causes 

 cited are efficient causes to a certain extent, in some cases very 

 slightly and in others more so, but what I say and have always said 

 is, that they have been absurdly exaggerated, and made to do service 

 in every fantastic way, and if we are to cure many of these mistaken 



