The Zoologist— June, 1871. 2617 



a progenitor at all, and its parents were not known to have possessed 

 this abnormal appendage. 



Supposing a man to be writing a history of England, he would 

 consult every previous history, every previous record ; he would 

 sift all accessible evidence as to dates, names, and relationships, 

 and would compile his pedigree of our gracious Queen from 

 authentic sources, or would be silent. Now there is one source 

 of information for the "Descent of Man," and that Mr. Darwin 

 ignores. True, there is the " Testimony of the Rocks," but that is 

 worse than silent, it is adverse. He has therefore reduced himself 

 to the pecessity of inferring, assuming, guessing; and I contend 

 that inferences, assumptions and guesses, however subtle, however 

 ingenious, however plausible, can only obtain the most unsatis- 

 factory of all verdicts, that of " Not Proven." 



Touching this theory of pedigree, this chain of linear descent, 

 Mr. Darwin is thoroughly aware of the vast gap that exists 

 between the highest ape and the lowest man ; and he makes no 

 attempt to prove that an intermediate creature ever stood in this 

 gap : not only is literature silent on the subject, but Geology 

 emphatically denies the existence of such a creature. It is easy to 

 imagine "a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed 

 ears, probably arboreal in its habits and an inhabitant of ihe Old 

 World," but it is quite another thing to prove it, and in the entire 

 absence of proof we cannot accept conjecture. The nearest 

 approach of a brute to man is scarcely to be found in the chim- 

 panzee, gorilla or ourang, but rather in the genus Hylobates, the 

 gibbons, and perhaps especially in the extinct European Dryo- 

 pithecus, a creature that Mr. Darwin has not overlooked, and one 

 of which St. George Mivart has very recently pointed out the 

 anthropoid characters; but even Dryopithecus will not answer 

 Mr. Darwin's purpose : this miocene chiropod, as Mr. Mivart 

 has well observed, confirms the claim of the gibbons to be placed 

 at the head of all the apes, deposing even the gorilla from his 

 throne of preeminence, but certainly is no connecting link between 

 apes and man. 



There is another very marked characteristic of the volumes 

 before me : 1 allude to the introduction of such an enormous mass 

 of matter that might be called irrelevant. The author's own 

 resources, his own fund of zoological lore, seem well nigh inex- 

 haustible; but, not content with this, he has laid his friends under 



