THE DESCENT OF MAN 141 



shrews and hedgehogs, and thence once more by very 

 well-marked intermediate stages to the lemurs of 

 Madagascar, a group linked on the one hand to the 

 insectivores, and on the other to the true monkeys. The 

 monkeys, again, ' branched off into two great stems 

 the New World and Old World monkeys ; and from the 

 latter, at a remote period, man, the wonder and glory of 

 the universe, proceeded.' 



The word was spoken; the secret was out. The 

 world might well have been excused for treating it 

 scornfully. But as a matter of fact, the storm which 

 followed the c Descent of Man ' was as nothing compared 

 with the torrent of abuse that had pursued the author 

 of the ' Origin of Species.' In twelve years society 

 had grown slowly accustomed to the once startling idea, 

 and it listened now with comparatively languid interest 

 to the final utterance of the great biologist on the 

 question of its own origin and destinies. In 1859 it 

 cried in horror, ' How very shocking ! ' in 1871, it 

 murmured complacently, ' Is that all ? Why, everybody 

 knew that much already ! ' 



Nevertheless, on the moral and social side, the 

 ultimate importance of the ' Descent of Man ' upon the 

 world's history can hardly be overrated by a philosophic 

 investigator. Vast as was the revolution effected in 

 biology by the ' Origin of Species,' it was as nothing 

 compared with the still wider, deeper, and more subtly- 

 working revolution inaugurated by the announcement 

 of man's purely animal origin. The main discovery, 

 strange to say, affected a single branch of thought alone ; 

 the minor corollary drawn from it to a single species 

 has already affected, and is destined in the future still 



