DOGMATIC METHODS OF TEACHING. 73 



actual experiment " as the highest means of proof," 

 which gives evidence for these " certain facts " ? The 

 whole discussion in general about pre-historic man, 

 which Virchow has mixed up with his Munich address 

 (pp. 30, 31), is the clearest evidence of the uncritical 

 spirit in which he deals with these historical problems 

 as " exact natural sciences." He assures us that " not 

 one single ape's skull, nor skull of an anthropoid ape, 

 has ever been found which could actually have belonged 

 to a human owner ! and he adds this sentence, in italics, 

 " We cannot teach, for we cannot regard it as a real 

 acquisition of science, that man is descended from the 

 ape or from any other, animal ! " Then evidently no 

 alternative remains but that he is descended from a 

 god, or from a clod ! 



But let us go over the rest of the sciences to see 

 what, according to Virchow, may be taught in each 

 without endangering the safety of science. In the 

 whole department of biology, as well as in zoology 

 including anthropology and in botany, instruction 

 must be limited to imparting those trifling fragments 

 of knowledge which either consist of mere descriptions 

 of dry facts, or which supply an explanation of them 

 by mathematical formulas. Morphology must be taught 

 as mere descriptive anatomy and systematising, the 

 history of development as mere descriptive ontogenesis. 

 Comparative anatomy and phylogenesis, which by their 



