SCIENCE. 



199 



called a gulf. But in Australasia the breadth and depth 

 of this gulf is rendered more conspicuous by the associa- 

 tion ot Man with a series of animals absolutely wanting 

 in those higher members of the Mammalian Class which 

 elsewhere minister to his wanls, and the use of which is 

 among the first elements of a civilized condition. Alone 

 everywhere, and separate from other beings, Man is most 

 conspicuously alone in those strange and distant lands 

 where his high crganization is in contact wiih nothing 

 nearer to itself than the low marsupial brain. 



To those who connect the origin of Man with the the- 

 ory of Development or Evolution, in any shape or in any 

 form, these peculiar circumstances respecting the fauna 

 of Australasia indicate beyond all doubt that Man is not 

 there indigenous. They stamp him as an immigrant in 

 those regions — a wanderer frcm other lands. Nor will 

 this conclusion be less assuredly held by those who be- 

 lieve that in some special sense Man has been created. 

 There is something more than an incongruity in suppos- 

 ing that there was a separate Tasmanian Adam. The 

 belief that the creation of Man has been a special work 

 is not inconsistent with the belief that in the time, 

 and in the circumstances, and in the method of this 

 work, it had a definite relation to the previous 

 course and history of Cteation — so that Man did 

 net appear until all these lower animals had 

 been born, which were destined to minister to his necessi- 

 ties, and to afford him the means and opportunities for 

 that kind of development which is peculiarly his own. 

 On the contrary, this doctrine of the previous creation of 

 the lower animals, which is, peihaps, more firmly estab- 

 lished on the facts of science than any other resp cting 

 the origin of Man, is a doctrine fitting closely into the 

 fundamental conceptions which inspire the belief that 

 Man has been produced by operations as exceptional as 

 their result. And so it is, that when we see men inhabit- 

 ing lands destitute of all the higher Mammalia, which are 

 elsewhere his servants or companions — destitute even of 

 those productions of the vegetable kingdom, which alone 

 repay the cultivation of the soil, we conclude with certainty 

 that he is there a wanderer from some distant lands, 

 where the work of creation had been carried farther, and 

 where the conditions of surrounding Nature were such as 

 to afford him 'he conditions of a home. 



We see, then, that the question asked by Mr. Darwin, 

 in respect to the Fuegians, is a question arising equally in 

 respect to all the races who inhabit regions of the globe, 

 which from any cause present conditions highly unfavor- 

 able to Man. Just as Mr. Darwin asked, what could have 

 induced tribes to travel down the American continent to 

 a climate so rigorous as Cape Horn ? — just as we have 

 asked, on the same principle, what could have induced 

 men to travel along the same continent in an opposite di- 

 rection till they reached and settled within the Arctic 

 Circle ? — so now we have to ask, what could have induced 

 men to travel from Asia, or from the rich and splendid 

 islands of the Eastern Archipelago, and to take up their 

 . abode in Australasia ? 



In every one of these cases the change has been greatly 

 for the worse. It has been a change not only involving 

 comparative disadvantages, but positive disabilities — 

 affecting the fundamental elements of civilization, and 

 subjecting those who underwent that change to deteriorat- 

 ing influences of the most powerful kind. 



It follows from these considerations as a necessary con- 

 sequence that the present condition of the Australian, or 

 the recent condition of the Tasmanian, cannot possibly be 

 any trustworthy indication of the condition of their an- 

 cestors, when they lived in more favored regions. The 

 same argument applies to them which, as we have seen, 

 applies to the Fuegians and the Eskimo. If all these 

 families of Mankind are the descendants of men, who at 

 some former time inhabited countries wholly different in 

 climate, and in productions, and in all the facilities which 

 these afford for the development of the special faculties of 



the race, it is in the highest degree improbable that a 

 change of habitat so great should have been without a 

 corresponding effect upon those over whom it passed. 

 Nor is it a matter of doubt or mere speculation that this 

 effect must have been in the highest degree unfavorable. 

 The conclusion, therefore, to which we are led is, that 

 such races as those which inhabit Australasia, are indeed 

 the results of development, or of evolution — but of the de- 

 velopment of unfavorable conditions, and of the evolution 

 of the natural effects of these. Instead of assuming them 

 to be the nearest living representative of primeval Man we 

 should be more safe in assuming them to represent the 

 widest departure from that earliest condition of our race 

 which, on the theory of Development, must of necessity 

 have been associated at first with the most highly favor- 

 able conditions or external Nature. 



DOLBEAR ON THE NATURE AND CONSTITU- 

 TION OF MATTER. 

 A Critique. 



There appeared in " SciFNCE" a series of three papers 1 

 by Professor A. E. Dolbear which ccntain such new and 

 somewhat startling ideas on the nature and constituticn 

 of matter that an interesting controversy was to be ex- 

 pected. Nearly six months have, however, passed 

 without any objections having been raised to any of the 

 Professor's statements, some of which seem to me quite 

 strange and of rather peculiar mathematics withal. I 

 now, with no little hesitation enter a piotest against some 

 of these statements. The subject of the constitution of 

 matter is so intricate, so complicated, beset with so many 

 difficulties on the ore hand, while on the other our means 

 of dealing with it are so inadequate, our methods of in- 

 vestigation so imperfect that, as Maxwell says, all we can 

 do is to make hypotheses and see how far our facts and 

 phenomena bear them out. This being so, I believe that 

 whenever a particularly bcld hypothesis is made and con- 

 clusions are drawn therefrcm by anyone without having 

 made a most careful comparison with all the principal 

 phenomena of matter, the humblest student of this fas- 

 cinating department of physical science has a right to com- 

 mand a most vigorous halt, and to examine whether he 

 who assumes to guide is himself sufficiently acquainted 

 with the intricacies and windings of the road not to lead 

 his followers into the dismal swamps of metaphysical vag- 

 aries. I therefore claim for myself that right, lest what I 

 have to say might be construed as too presumptuous. 



In my review I shall, in the main, touch upon and dis- 

 cuss the points I desire to examine, in the order in which 

 they occur in the Professor's papers. To begin, then, 

 with the first paper, Section II, I shall devote a little at- 

 tention to the equation E' = which the Professor 



2 



says expresses the total energy of an atom. It seems an 

 altogether gratuitous assumption to give to the expres- 

 sion for the total energy of an atom the same form that 

 Clausius gives for the total energy of a molecule. In the 

 molecule we have the motion of translation and also the 

 motion or motions of its parts relative to its centre of 

 mass ; but of the atom we cannot make the same asser- 

 tion. Clausius was justified, by mathematical deductions 

 from experimental data, to assume that the total energy 

 of the molecule is proportional to the energy of agita- 

 tion ; but that does by no means justify the assumption 

 that the same form of function also expresses the total 

 energy of the atom, for here all experimental data are want- 

 ing. We may, however, reasonably conclude that the 

 form of this function for the atom must differ somewhat 

 from that for the molecule, as the motions of the atom 

 must, of necessity, be much more intricate and complex 



On Seme Needed Changes and Additions to Physical Nomencla- 

 ture," Vol. I ., p. 238 ; On Jlatter as a Form of Energy,'' Vol. II., p. 

 49, and " On the Amplitude of Vibration of Atoms," Vol. II., p. 146, 



