Owen on Man's Place 145 



strongly anything that seemed at all likely to disturb 

 the somewhat narrow orthodoxy prevalent in those 

 times ; and, as there were comparatively few posts open 

 to scientific men, and comparatively greater chances of 

 posts being made for men of talent and ability who ad- 

 hered to the respectable traditions, those who tampered 

 with so serious a question as the place of man were 

 likely to burn their fingers severely. Howev^er, the 

 difficulties of discussing these problems were much 

 greater immediately after 1859. One of the most sur- 

 prising things in the history of this century is the sud- 

 den intensity of the opposition of the public, particularly 

 the respectable and religious public, to zoological writ- 

 ing upon man, immediately after the publication of the 

 On'gi)!. Before that time anatomists did not neces- 

 sarily hesitate to point out the close resemblance be- 

 tween the anatomy of man and that of the higher apes, 

 and the difficulties anatomists had in making anatomi- 

 cal distinction of value between them. Thus Professor 

 Owen, wdio, as a writer, was rather unusually nervous 

 about expressing facts to which any objection nn'ght be 

 raised by those outside the strictly scientific world, had 

 written the following paragraph in the course of an 

 essay on the characters of the class Mammalia, pub- 

 lished, in 1857, ill the Journal of the Proceedings of the 

 I An nee an Society : 



" Not beiug able to appreciate or conceive of the distinction 

 between the psychical phenomena of a chimpanzee and of a 

 Boschisnian or of an Aztec, with arrested brain-growth, as be- 

 ing of a nature so essential as to preclude a comparison be- 

 tween them, or as being other than a difference of degree, I 

 cannot shut my eyes to the significance of that all-pervading 

 similitude of structure — every tooth, every bone, strictly 

 homologous — which makes the determination of the differ- 

 ence between Homo and Pithecus the anatomist's difficulty." 



