PROFESSOK VIRCHOW AND EVOLUTION. 405 



so utterly discredited, should be in any way accepted as 

 the basis of all our views of life.' I hold with Virchow 

 that the failures have been lamentable, that the doc- 

 trine is utterly discredited. But my position here is so 

 well known that I need not dwell upon it further. 



With one special utterance of Professor Virchow his 

 translator connects me by name. ' I have no objection,' 

 observes the Professor, ' to your saying that atoms of 

 carbon also possess mind, or that in their connection 

 with the Plastidule company they acquire mind ; only 

 / do not know how I am to perceive this.' This is 

 substantially what I had said seventeen years previously 

 in the c Saturday Review.' The Professor continues : 

 ( If I explain attraction and repulsion as exhibitions of 

 mind, as psychical phenomena, I simply throw the 

 Psyche out of the window, and the Psyche ceases to be 

 a Psyche.' I may say, in passing, that the Psyche that 

 could be cast out of the window is not worth house- 

 room. At this point the translator, who is evidently a 

 man of culture, strikes in with a foot-note. ' As an 

 illustration of Professor Virchow's meaning, we may 

 quote the conclusion at which Doctor Tyndall arrives 

 respecting the hypothesis of a human soul, offered as 

 an explanation or a simplification of a series of obscure 

 phenomena psychical phenomena, as he calls them. 

 " If you are content to make your soul a poetic rendering 

 of a phenomenon which refuses the yoke of ordinary 

 physical laws, I, for one, would not object to this 

 exercise of ideality." ' l Professor Virchow's meaning, 

 I admit, required illustration; but I do not clearly 

 see how the quotation from me subserves this purpose. 

 I do not even .know whether I am cited as meriting 



1 Presidential Address delivered before the Birmingham and 

 Midland Institute, October 1, 1877. ' Fortnightly Review,' Nov. 1, 

 1877, p. 607, 



