70 How Regarded by Scientists. 



qualified adherence to Darwin s essential doctrine. 

 Helmholtz asserts that, while natural selection may 

 have been competent to produce varieties within 

 the same species, and even many so-called species, 

 the question of the descent of species in general, 

 and man in particular, is at present determined 

 rather by the preconceptions of individual in 

 vestigators than by the facts themselves. And 

 Yircliow, after claiming for experts alone the 

 final adjudication of the question (and this claim 

 every dispassionate thinker will concede), goes on 

 to observe that at the present time there is no 

 actual warrant for taking the step from the theory 

 of descent (which, let me say, was as fascinating 

 for Kant as for Darwin) to the fact of descent, 

 though, on the other hand, there is no ground for 

 maintaining that it is either impossible or irra 

 tional. More important still is the testimony of 

 Alfred Russell Wallace, the joint discoverer with 

 Darwin of the theory of natural selection. And 

 yet it is Wallace who tells us that &quot; natural selec 

 tion could only have endowed the savage with a 

 brain a little superior to that of an ape.&quot; Lastly, 

 Darwin s friend and defender, Professor Huxley, 

 tempering his well-founded admiration with 

 equally well-founded scepticism, reminds us in 

 no uncertain tones that our &quot; acceptance of the 



