REVIEWS. 
241 
We have filled so much of our space with this cursory sketch of M. de 
Quatrefages’ deeply interesting volume — a course with which we feel sure 
our readers will be better pleased than they would have been with any 
lengthened criticisms of our own — that we have but little room left to com- 
ment upon its merits. 
In the first place, we must be orthodox, and find fault. M. de Quatrefages 
is a special pleader ; an honest and truthful one, it is true ; but a special 
pleader, notwithstanding ; and we must therefore not be surprised to find 
that here and there his enthusiasm has carried him into the expression of 
extreme opinions. 
However great may be our sympathy with the animal races, we plead 
guilty to the weakness of preferring, at least, a separate order for our- 
selves ; but at the same time, we can hardly go to the length to which 
our author does, of requiring a distinct realm in nature for our race. 
It is true some of us have Divine attributes ; but if mankind be all of one 
species, at least there are many who stand so low down in that species that they 
approximate very closely to the Simise, — too closely to admit of a line of 
demarcation being drawn such as that denoted by our author. But we need 
only refer to his own pages in order to show that no such distinction 
exists, and that Man must still be placed at the head of the animal kingdom. 
The whole argument for the unity of the human species is based upon the 
physiological analogies existing between man and the lower animals, and upon 
the phenomena which accompany the life-history of both. 
Nay, that very being whom the author woidd sever from the animal races, 
as distinctly as he separates the latter from the Vegetable Kingdom, is almost 
in the same breath described by him “ zoologically,” not in words alone, but 
in fact. 
The day may, and we trust will come, when man will no longer be an 
animal ; but so long as an author derives his most cogent reasons for a 
belief in the unity of our species from the “ fertility of mongrel races,” 
&c. &c., it hardly seems consistent that he should disconnect him from the 
animal realm. 
There is another question, too, in which our judgment may perhaps be a 
little biassed by the author’s strictures upon our treatment of the Aborigines 
in Australia, but on which our views and Iris do not coincide. 
One of his arguments in favour of the unity of our species is founded on 
what he deems to be the fact, that there is less difference between the most 
degraded Australian and the most enlightened European than between many 
individuals even of the same race amongst the lower animals. Against such 
a theory we must enter our protest, and although we rarely have recourse to 
the argumentum ad homincm, yet, in this instance, it appears to us so 
convincing that we shall indulge in it, and at the same time apologize to our 
author for the odious comparison which his “ theory ” has suggested. 
A lady friend, who has resided many years in Australia, once informed us 
that the natives used to enter the inclosure attached to her house, where logs 
of wood were stored, and, half-naked as they were, squatted down and regaled 
themselves with great gusto upon the white maggots winch inhabited the 
logs. Sometimes they even entered the house in search of greater dainties 
(of what they consisted, our friend did not state ; probably of mice) ; and 
