KEVIEWS. 
293 
Darwinian opponents call upon the author almost to show them, by 
ocular demonstration, the truth of his views. Of course such a demon- 
stration would be absolutely impossible, for those changes which Mr. 
Darwin supposes to take place have occupied millions of years in their 
performance, step by step. It is remarkable that of the various opponents 
which Mr. Darwin has raised up to his views, most of them consider 
that the shaping of an implement for use is not only peculiar to man, but 
must be so. And, after all, is there not much truth in Sir John Lubbock’s 
suggestion, that when primeval man first used flint stones for any purpose, he 
would have accidentally splintered them, and would then have used their 
sharp fragments. “From this step it would be a small one to intentionally 
break the flints, and not a very wide step to rudely fashion them. This 
latter advance, however, may have taken long ages, if we may judge bv the 
immense interval of time which elapsed before the men of the neolithic 
period took to grinding and polishing their stone tools. In breaking the 
flints, as Sir J. Lubbock likewise remarks, sparks would have been emitted, 
and in grinding them heat would have been evolved ; thus the two usual 
methods of obtaining fire may have originated.” Surely this is nothing but 
probability, and no sane person can object to reasoning conducted on so fair 
a scale. It is not too much intelligence to expect from anything superior 
to a modern ape or baboon. Even animals lower in the scale possess very 
nearly power enough for this. “No one,” says Mr. Darwin, “ supposes that 
one of the lower animals reflects whence he comes or whither he goes — 
what is death or what is life, and so forth. But can we feel sure that an 
old dog, with an excellent memory and some power of imagination, as shown 
by his dreams, never reflects on his past pleasures in the chase ? and this 
would be a form of self-consciousness. On the other hand, as Biichner has 
remarked, how little can the hard-worked wife of a degraded Australian 
savage, who uses hardly any abstract words, and cannot count above four, 
exert her self-consciousness, or reflect on the nature of her own existence.” 
Really these observations are very true ; they lead us to make comparisons 
between the highest civilised man and the lowest savage, and to confess 
that the gap intellectually, if not structurally, is very great indeed. 
Mr. Darwin attempts to trace the backward career of man ; and although 
he does not bring forward a massive case in its favour, he urges some 
evidence that is of a serious nature. He says that the most ancient 
progenitors in the kingdom of the Vertebrata, at which we are able to 
obtain an obscure glance, apparently consisted of a group of marine 
animals resembling the larva of existing Ascidians. These animals probably 
gave rise to a group of fishes, as truly organised as the Lancelet 5 and from 
these the Ganoids and other fishes like the Lepidosiren must have been 
developed. From such fish Mr. Darwin thinks a very small advance would 
carry us on to the amphibians. Birds and reptiles, he has shown, were once 
intimately connected together, and the Monotremata now in a slight degree 
connect mammals with reptiles. But no one can at present say by what 
line of descent the three higher and related classes — namely, mammals, 
birds, and reptiles — were derived from either of the two lower vertebral 
classes, namely amphibians and fishes. In the classes of mammals the steps 
are not difficult to conceive which led from the ancient Monotremata to the 
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