LIFE OF DR. ROLLESTON. XXX111 



centres of creation enormously, and laying it down as an axiom 

 that man was created at different centres of creation, just as 

 they hold other animals to have been. This for the Northerns : 

 of course the Slaveholders join in with great earnestness. The 

 other day, a Black Prince came to my Museum, especially to 

 discover whether his brains were constructed on the same plan 

 as those of the white races. Some Americans had told him the 

 two things were quite different. Without being a Darwinite to 

 the entire length he goes, I cannot avoid being one as far as 

 man goes. ... As it seems to me, however, Archbishop Usher's 

 chronology and the doctrine of the Human Race are non- 

 consistent, and you must give up either St. Paul on Mars' Hill, 

 or the Archbishop as he wrote in Dublin. I am very full of 

 Ethnology just now and am collecting human skulls from all 

 parts.' The interest in the early history of Man thus awakened 

 by the problem of his relation to lower animals as raised by 

 Darwin, came before Rolleston's mind a few months later in a 

 more intense and personal form, in the Zoological Section of the 

 British Association, at a memorable meeting, which Professor 

 Acland, who was present also, mentions twenty years after in 

 his obituary notice of his friend. ' It so happened, that in 1 860 

 a circumstance took place which tended materially to con- 

 centrate all the qualities of Ijis nature on the highest biological 

 questions, whether considered from the material or psychological 

 point of view. The British Association met in Oxford, and the 

 famous discussion on the hippocampus in the brain of man as 

 compared with that of the higher apes took place between 

 Professors Owen and Huxley. Bishop Wilberforce brought, as 

 is well remembered by all scientific men, the forces of his ready 

 wit and great reputation to bear against the sincere statements 

 of the younger anatomist. Rolleston's indignation was fired, 

 his sense of justice made him throw heart as well as head into 

 the cause of what, at the moment, seemed the weaker man. It 

 is not possible to say now to what extent that brief scene 

 influenced the ardour and imagination of Rolleston. Be this as 

 it may, all prejudice and even bias derived from the most 



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