Febecary 1, 1888.] 



♦ KNOWLEDGK ♦ 



87 



and like chemical elements of the heavenly bodies, of the 

 distance and size of large numbers of them, of the molecular 

 constitution of matter, of the conservation of energy, of the 

 fundamental identity of stuff in sun and planets and in all 

 life-forms, and finally, of the mighty processes which have 

 evolved the not-living and living totality of the universe 

 from a diffused mass of vapour ; — these are the triumphs of 

 the human intellect, and now, perchance, it may not do 

 amiss if it turn aside for a time to problems which are less 

 remote, and in the solution of which the heart must play a 

 large part — namely, the redress of social ills which make the 

 " struggle for life " more severe among civUised races than 

 among barbaric races and the lower animals. 



Edward Clodd. 



THE ORIGIN OF MAN. 



ROFESSOR MAX MULLER has just brought 

 out his " Science of Thought," the true object 

 of which is to show that thought is an aspect 

 of language, whatever that mysterious state- 

 ment may mean. Fortunately Professor 

 Miiller explains at the outset that it reallv 

 matters little or nothing whether we regard 

 thought as he does or as men have hitherto regarded it — 

 — that is, as a process relating to objects, attributes, and 

 acts, whose working cannot proceed without language of 

 some sort. If ever Professor Miiller 's idea is establLshed 

 thought will go on just as it did before; or, as he himself 

 puts it, '■ we should remain in every respect exactly as we 

 were before, we should only comprehend our inner workings 

 under new and, I believe, more correct names." 



But Professor Miiller has further undertaken in this new- 

 old work of his to renew his attack on the general theory of 

 biological evolution (of which the Darwinian theory is but a 

 part), an attack which had considerable interest fourteen 

 years ago, but is now wholly out of date. It is not to deal 

 with Miiller's worn-out objection that articulate speech 

 separates man absolutely from all animals that I am now 

 about to write of Jliiller and Darwin ; but as Miiller repre- 

 sents a type of anti-Darwinians which is very wide-spread, 

 I propo.se to consider here the strange misapprehensions 

 into which he and others of his type have fallen respecting 

 the doctrine of biological evolution, which in its general 

 form is now universally accepted by all whose opinion can 

 reasonably be regarded as of any weight.* 



The fatal error — fatal at least so far as understanding 

 evolution is concerned — into which Max Miiller and most 

 other anti-Darwinians fall, is that of supposing that the 

 modern biological doctrine of the origin of man regards the 

 human race as descended from a single pair. " Popular 

 scientific opinion now," says Miiller (meaning, as the con- 

 text shows, the ideas generally accepted as the teaching of 

 leading biologists), " is decidedly in favour of one primitive 

 pan- of human parents— nay, it hankers for one ]irimordial 

 ancestor for all ancestors, and in the end for all organic 

 beings." 



If Professor Miiller had said that this was the common 

 misinterpretation of the teachings of Darwin and of Darwin's 



* It is from no want of respect for Muller, whose position in his 

 own scientific department is very high and thoroughly merited, that 

 I include him among those whose opinion about Darwinism has no 

 weight ; it is simply because, like others of his type, he has not 

 cared to make himself acquainted even with the elementary details 

 of the theory he rejects. He is in that respect like a clerical 

 person who, being asked by a friend of mine if he had carefully 

 studied certain writings he had been enthusiastically objurgating, 

 replied earnestly, " Thank God, I have never even seen them ! " 



co-workers and followers, he would have been near the 

 truth. Darwin speaks repeatedly of the ape-like progenitor 

 of the human race, of man's anthropoid ancestor, and so 

 forth ; and his fellow -workers and followers have used 

 similar expressions. Again, Darwin and the Darwinians 

 speak of the probability that the primordial forms from 

 which animal and vegetable life sprang may have been very 

 few — four or five, perhaps — perhaps fewer — perhaps even 

 but one. Probably Darwin and his followers have never 

 conceived it possible that this way of speaking could be 

 misunderstood. 



Yet very soon after the " Origin of Species " was written, 

 in which the descent of man from the brute creation was 

 barely hinted at, the unscientific world began to picture a 

 pair of gorillas instead of Adam and Eve as the progenitors 

 of man ; and a host of unknowing ones began to ask where- 

 abouts the four or five bits of protoplasm appeared on the 

 earth from whom the whole stream of life upon our globe 

 has descended. The mistake is such an absurd one that, 

 resulting as it does from the literal interpretation of Darwin's 

 words, one rather wonders those words were not read more 

 literally still, in which case the first and most obvious 

 objection to be urged against the Darwinian theory would 

 be that it makes man descend from a single progenitor, not 

 from a pair, and descent from a single progenitor is very 

 diflicult to comprehend. Absurd as this is, descent from a 

 single pair is, for one who knows anything about biological 

 laws, altogether as difficult to accept as descent from a single 

 ancestor, whether male or female. 



But the fact is that no one who has studied Darwin's chief 

 works (valuable almost as much for what they teach respect- 

 ing evolution generally as for what thej' teach respecting the 

 Darwinian theory) can for a moment imagine that any race 

 whatsoever has sprung from a single pair, or even from a 

 small number of progenitors. When he speaks of an 

 ancestor, he means always an ancestral race. The ancestral 

 anthropoid ape, for example, is not a single ape or a single 

 pair, but that particular race of apes whose qualities, com- 

 bined with the qualities of their environment, and eventually 

 modified by the varying conditions of that environment, 

 resulted in progressive changes by which the lowest race or 

 races of man were developed. 



The question as to the single or multiple origin of man 

 which has been discussed among biologists has not been 

 whether man descended from one pair or from many thou- 

 sands of paii-s, but whether the present races of man all 

 descended from one race of anthropoid apes or from several 

 such races. On this last point there is room for discussion ; 

 on the former none. Aiiy one who considers the striking 

 resemblance between certain of the least lovely among the 

 African negroes and those unlovely African apes — the 

 gorilla and the chimpanzee — will be dispcsed to credit some 

 of the African tribes with descent from a race of African 

 apes akin both to the gorilla and to the chimpanzee, but 

 with superior opportunities of development toward the man- 

 like type. In like manner the orang-outang and the gibbon 

 ape may be regarded as nearer akin to the anthropoid 

 ancestors of the aboriginal inhabitants of the East Indian 

 Islands than any other apes now known to us. The ances- 

 tral apes from whom the savage progenitors of the Aryan, 

 Semitic, and Turanian races were descended, seem to have 

 left no descendants, nor have any of their near kindred; but 

 the time may one day come when their fossil remains will be 

 detected. 



Possibly, if recent suggestions respecting the origin of the 

 Aryan races may be accepted, we shall find the fossil ances- 

 tors of our own di\4sion of the human family in Finland. 

 But it may well be that, as is urged by many Darwinians, 

 the race whence gorillas and chimpanzees, oraugs, gibbons. 



