220 THE NEANDERTHAL SKULL. 



were really the great philosophers which 

 their admirers declare them to be, then their 

 intellectual character may be safely left to 

 the future. They do not need to have 

 their merits emblazoned as on a signpost, 

 for the applausive gaze of the common 

 herd " (p. 529). 



I believe there is too much truth in the 

 phrase which Mr. Wendell Holmes has 

 applied to Darwin, and Huxley, and 

 Herbert Spencer and others, that they 

 constitute " THE MUTUAL ADMIRATION SO- 

 CIETY." They are so frequently in the 

 habit of praising each other, that it has 

 ceased to be of any value. And when 

 Huxley talks about Darwin being the 

 greatest philosopher since Aristotle, a title 

 which Professor Owen, with far better 

 judgment, as we have already pointed out, 

 ascribed to Cuvier, we are inclined to 

 smile, when we recollect that in the first 

 edition of Darwin's Origin of Species the 

 author sagely intimated that the whole 

 might have been formed by Natural Se- 

 lection out of a bear that was once seen 



