THE DESCENT OF MAN 133 



man's common ancestry with the anthropoid apes. As 

 early as the middle of the last century, indeed, Lord 

 Monboddo, a whimsical Scotch eccentric, had suggested 

 in his famous book on the origin of language the idea 

 that men were merely developed monkeys. But this 

 crude and unorganised statement of a great truth, 

 being ultimately based upon no distinct physical grounds, 

 deserved scarcely to be classed higher than the childish 

 evolutionism of ' Telliamed ' De Maillet, which makes 

 birds descend from flying-fish and men the offspring 

 of the hypothetical tritons. On this point as on most 

 others the earliest definite scientific views are those of 

 Buffon, who ventured to hint with extreme caution the 

 possibility of a common ancestry for man and all other 

 vertebrate animals. Goethe the all-sided had caught 

 a passing glimpse of the same profound conception 

 about the date of the Reign of Terror ; and Erasmus 

 Darwin had openly announced it, though without much 

 elaboration, in his precocious and premature ' Zoonomia.' 

 Still more specifically, in a note to the 'Temple of 

 Nature,' the English evolutionist says : l It has been 

 supposed by some that mankind were formerly qua- 

 drupeds. . . . These philosophers, with Buffon and 

 Helvetius, seem to imagine that mankind arose from 

 one family of monkeys on the banks of the Mediter- 

 ranean : ' and in the third canto of that fantastic poem, 

 he enlarges upon the great part performed by the hand, 

 with its opposable thumb, in the development and pro- 

 gress of the human species. Lamarck, in his ' Philo- 

 sophie Zoologique,' distinctly lays down the doctrine 

 that man is descended from an ape-like ancestor, which 

 gradually acquired the upright position, not even now 



