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1866. | Darwin and his Teachings. 163 
In Tierra del Fuego, he says he saw the most abject and miserable 
creatures he anywhere beheld.* On one occasion, all the men and 
women were naked, and the rain was pouring down upon them; 
on another, a woman, suckling an infant, “came alongside the 
vessel, and remained there, out of mere curiosity, while the sleet 
fell and thawed on her naked bosom, and on the skin of her naked 
baby.” These poor creatures were “stunted in their growth, 
their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy 
and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, and 
their gestures violent.” Their wants and habits of life needed no 
faculties higher than those of an ape ;} their capacity for improve- 
ment stood at zero; their language “scarcely deserves to be called 
articulate,” and “certainly no European ever cleared his throat 
with so many hoarse, guttural, and clicking sounds :t— 
“One’s mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, 
could our progenitors have been men like these? men whose very 
signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the 
domesticated animals; men who do not possess the instinct of those 
animals,§ nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts 
consequent on that reason, . . . . and part of the interest 
in beholding a savage is the same which would lead every one to 
desire to see the lion in his desert, the tiger tearing his prey in the 
jungle, or the rhinoceros wandering over the wild plains of Africa.” 
_ We are compelled to curtail this, and to omit many other 
passages of a like tenor, but have we not quoted enough to justify 
our surprise that, notwithstanding the revelations of bone-caves 
and of the drift, which prove that our progenitors have been “‘ men 
like these,”{! the ablest living exponent of the transmutation theory, 
and the founder of the doctrine of natural selection, should never 
so much as refer, directly or indirectly, to the origin of man ? 
Of course our readers are nearly all aware of the nature of that 
doctrine. His work on the ‘Origin of Species’ was published 
towards the end of the year 1859, about twenty years after the 
first appearance of his ‘Journal of Researches,’ the author having, 
in the interim, conferred great services upon the scientific world 
by his later treatises on the ‘ Voyage of the Beagle, on ‘The 
Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs,’ ‘Geological Observations 
on Volcanic Islands,’ ‘ Geological Observations on South America,’ 
and other minor publications ; indeed, he had already raised himself 
* «Journal of Researches,’ p. 213, t Ibid., p. 216, par. 1. 
t Ibid., pp. 205-6, last and first paragraphs. 
§ He gives examples of unfeeling brutality towards their offspring of which 
animals are not capable. 
|| ‘ Journal of Researches,’ p. 504. 
{ See, as a striking illustration of this truth, the remarks of Mr. Laing, M-P., 
in his work on the ‘ Pre-historic Remains of Caithness’ (Williams & Norgate), 
especially at p. 56, where he compares the Caithness aborigines with the inhabit- 
ants of Terra del Fuego, as described by Darwin, 
