2618 The Zoologist — June, 1871. 



contribution for their observations also ; and the result, as might 

 be expected, is a "zoological miscellany" of unexampled interest. 

 Still it is not to the point ; it will and must amuse and instruct, but 

 it cannot convince the most enthusiastic admirer that there is truth 

 in the hypothesis of evolution ; the concluding part of the first 

 volume and almost the whole of the second seem to have no 

 bearing whatever on the question discussed, the ape-origiu of man. 

 These six hundred pages are full of information, replete with 

 instruction in Zoology, but I think that the author has received 

 somewhat too readily and implicitly the statements of others: 

 I cannot, for instance, agree with the assertion that birds reject 

 hairy caterpillars, for 1 have long known that the cuckoo, that pre- 

 eniineully caterpillar-ealiug bird, feeds almost exclusively on the 

 hairy kinds. The villose coating of this singular bird's stomach 

 has caused much speculation, some ornithologists contending that 

 the villosily is natural and normal, others that the hairs of the 

 caterpillars it has devoured have become fixed iu the coating of the 

 stomach, and have thus produced the hairy surface in question. 

 Be this as it may, the fact of the cuckoo's feeding by preference 

 on hairy caterpillars does not admit of doubt. Any one might have 

 made this mistake, and I only notice it because it forms the ground- 

 work of an argument, and 1 desire to press on all speculative 

 naturalists that the staleiiicuts they receive should be most carefully 

 considered before they take the form of arguments ; for as facts are 

 in their very nature the best of arguments, so statements susceptible 

 of disproof are the worst and weakest; far from supporting, their 

 tendency is to subvert, the desired conclusions. 



Having passed for a moment from Mr. Darwin to his followers 

 I may mention a weakness which seems common to them all ; 

 I allude to the extreme irrilability they display when a critic or 

 opponent suggests that the hypothesis of ape-origin is not original 

 on Mr. Darwin's part. Why this should be I know not; indeed 

 1 cannot conceive why it should be either doubted or concealed 

 that Lamarck expounded the hypothesis of evolution, entering 

 in a methodical manner into the whole question. This is so 

 notorious to reading naturalists that to assume the contrary, to 

 deny to the really illustrious Frenchman any of the merits or 

 demerits of his extraordinary hypothesis, in order that they may 

 be bestowed on Mr. Darwin, has always seemed to me a lamentable 

 mistake. 



