kinds of monkeys have a strong taste for tea, coffee, and spirituous liquors; they will also, as I have myself seen, smoke tobacco with pleasure.' He also tells us of baboons which, after taking too much beer, 'on the following morning were very cross and dismal, held their aching heads with both hands, and wore a most pitiable expression: when beer or wine was offered them, they turned away with disgust, but relished the juice of lemons.' He notices, besides, the process of development in man -with the transitory resemblances it exhibits to the immature conditions of other animals, and he mentions certain muscular abnormalities.

6

Mr. Darwin also brings forward an observation of Mr. Woolner, the sculptor, as to a small projection of the helix or outermost fold of the human ear, which projection we may safely conclude to be a vestige of formerly pointed ears-which occasionally reappears in man' (vol. i. p. 23). Very many other interesting facts are noted which it would be superfluous here to recapitulate. It is, however, in connexion with man's bodily structure and its resemblances that we have observed slight errors on the part of Mr. Darwin, which it may be as well to point out; though it should be borne in mind that he does not profess to be in any sense an anatomist. Thus, at vol. i. p. 28, he mistakes the supra-condyloid foramen of the humerus for the inter-condyloid perforation. Did the former condition frequently occur in man-as, through this mistake, he asserts-it would be remarkable indeed, as it is only found in the lower monkeys and not in the higher. A more singular mistake is that of the malar bone for the premaxilla (vol. i. p. 124).

To return to the bodily and other characters enumerated at such length by Mr. Darwin. They may, and doubtless they will, produce a considerable effect on readers who are not anatomists, but in fact the whole and sole result is to show that man is an animal. That he is such is denied by no one, but has been taught and accepted since the time of Aristotle. We remember on one occasion meeting at a dinner-table a clever medical man of materialistic views. He strongly impressed the minds of some laymen present by an elaborate statement of the mental phenomena following upon different injuries, or diseased conditions of different parts of the brain, until one of the number remarked as a climax, Yes; and when the brain is entirely removed the mental phenomena cease altogether '-the previous observations having only brought out vividly what no denied, viz., that during this life a certain integrity of bodily structure is requisite for the due exercise of the mental powers, Thus Mr. Darwin's remarks are merely an elaborate statement of

one

what

what all admit, namely, that man is an animal. They further imply, however, that he is no more than an animal, and that the mode of origin of his visible being must be the mode of his origin as a whole-a conclusion of which we should not question the legitimacy if we could accept Mr. Darwin's views of man's mental powers.

All that can be said to be established by our author is, that if the various kinds of lower animals have been evolved one from the other by a process of natural generation or evolution, then it becomes highly probable a priori that man's body has been similarly evolved; but this, in such a case, becomes equally probable from the admitted fact that he is an animal at all.

The evidence for such a process of evolution of man's body amounts, however, only to an a priori probability, and might be reconciled with another mode of origin if there were sufficient reason (of another kind) to justify a belief in such other mode of origin. Mr. Darwin says:- It is only our natural prejudice, and that arrogance which made our forefathers declare that they were descended from demi-gods, which leads us to demur to this conclusion' (vol. i. p. 32). But this is not the case; for many demur to his conclusion because they believe that to accept his view would be to contradict other truths which to them are far more evident.

He also makes the startling assertion that to take any other view than his as to man's origin, 'is to admit that our own structure and that of all the animals around us, is a mere snare laid to entrap our judgment' (vol. i. p. 32). Mr. Darwin is, we are quite sure, far enough from pretending that he has exhausted the possibilities of the case, and yet could anything but a conviction that the whole field had been explored exhaustively, justify such an assertion? If, without such a conviction, it were permissible so to dogmatize, every theorizer who had attained to a plausible explanation of a set of phenomena might equally make use of the assertion, and say, until a better explanation was found, that to doubt him would be to attribute duplicity to the Almighty.

In tracing man's origin Mr. Darwin is again betrayed into slight inaccuracies. Thus, in combating the position, advanced in this 'Review,'* that the hands of apes had been preformed (with a view to man) in a condition of perfection beyond their needs, he says:—

'On the contrary, I see no reason to doubt that a more perfectly constructed hand would have been an advantage to them, provided, and it is important to note this, that their hands had not thus been

rendered less well adapted for climbing trees. We may suspect that a perfect hand would have been disadvantageous for climbing; as the most arboreal monkeys in the world, namely Ateles in America and Hylobates in Asia, either have their thumbs much reduced in size and even rudimentary, or their fingers partially coherent, so that their hands are converted into grasping-hooks.'-vol. i. p. 140.

In a note, Mr. Darwin refers to the Syndactyle Gibbon as having two of the digits coherent. But these digits are not, as he supposes, digits of the hand but toes. Moreover, though doubtless the Gibbons and spider-monkeys are admirably organized for their needs, yet it is plain that a well-developed thumb is no impediment to climbing, for the strictly arboreal Lemurs are exceedingly well furnished in this respect. Again he says (vol. i. p. 143) of the Gibbons, that they, without having been taught, can walk or run upright with tolerable quickness, though they move awkwardly, and much less securely than man.' This is a little misleading, inasmuch as it is not stated that this upright progression is effected by placing the enormously long arms behind the head or holding them out backwards as a balance in progression.

We have already seen that Mr. Darwin tries to account for man's hairlessness by the help of 'sexual selection.' He also, however, speculates as to the possibility of his having lost it through heat of climate, saying:-'Elephants and rhinoceroses are almost hairless; and as certain extinct species which formerly lived under an arctic climate were covered with long wool or hair, it would almost appear as if the existing species of both genera had lost their hairy covering from exposure to heat' (vol. i. p. 148).

This affords us a good example of hasty and inconclusive speculation. Surely it would be as rational to suppose that the arctic species had gained their coats as that the tropical species had lost theirs. But over-hasty conclusions are, we regret to say, the rule in Mr. Darwin's speculations as to man's genealogy. He carries that genealogy back to some ancient form of animal life somewhat like an existing larval Ascidian; and he does this on the strength of the observations of Kowalevsky and Kuppfer. He assumes at once that the similarities of structure which those observers detected are due to descent instead of to independent similarity of evolution, though the latter mode of origin is at least possible, and can hardly be considered improbable when we reflect on the close similarity independently induced in the eyes of fishes and cephalopods.

*See Professor Rolleston's Address at the Liverpool Meeting of the British Association, 1870.'

Quite recently, however, observations have been published by Dr. Donitz, which render it necessary, at the least, to pause and reconsider the question before admitting the Ascidian ancestry of the Vertebrate sub-kingdom.

We now come to the consideration of a subject of great importance-namely, that of man's mental powers. Are they, as Mr. Darwin again and again affirms that they are,† different only in degree and not in kind from the mental powers of brutes? As is so often the case in discussions, the error to be combated is an implied negation. Mr. Darwin implies and seems to assume that when two things have certain characters in common there can be no fundamental difference between them.

To avoid ambiguity and obscurity, it may be well here to state plainly certain very elementary matters. The ordinary antecedents and concomitants of distinctly felt sensations may exist, with all their physical consequences, in the total absence of intellectual cognizance, as is shown by the well-known fact, that when through fracture of the spine the lower limbs of a man are utterly deprived of the power of feeling, the foot may nevertheless withdraw itself from tickling just as if a sensation was consciously felt. Amongst lower animals, a decapitated frog will join its hind feet together to push away an irritating object just as an uninjured animal will do. Here we have coadjusted actions resulting from stimuli which normally produce sensation, but occurring under conditions in which cerebral action does not take place. Did it take place we should have sensations, but by no means necessarily intellectual action.

'Sensation' is not 'thought,' and no amount of the former would constitute the most rudimentary condition of the latter, though sensations supply the conditions for the existence of 'thought' or 'knowledge.'

Altogether, we may clearly distinguish at least six kinds of action to which the nervous system ministers :

I. That in which impressions received result in appropriate movements without the intervention of sensation or thought, as in the cases of injury above given. (This is the reflex action of the nervous system.)

II. That in which stimuli from without result in sensations through the agency of which their due effects are wrought out. (Sensation.)

See 'Journal für Anatomie und Physiologie,' edited by Reichert and Dubois. Berlin.

+ There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.'-Descent of Man, vol. i. p. 35. F 2

III.

III. That in which impressions received result in sensations which give rise to the observation of sensible objects.-Sensible perception.

IV. That in which sensations and perceptions continue to coalesce, agglutinate, and combine in more or less complex aggregations, according to the laws of the association of sensible perceptions.-Association,

The above four groups contain only indeliberate operations, consisting, as they do at the best, but of mere presentative sensible ideas in no way implying any reflective or representative faculty. Such actions minister to and form Instinct. Besides these, we may distinguish two other kinds of mental action, namely :—

V. That in which sensations and sensible perceptions are reflected on by thought and recognised as our own and we ourselves recognised by ourselves as affected and perceiving.-Selfconsciousness.

VI. That in which we reflect upon our sensations or perceptions, and ask what they are and why they are.--Reason.

These two latter kinds of action are deliberate operations, performed, as they are, by means of representative ideas implying the use of a reflective representative faculty. Such actions distinguish the intellect or rational faculty. Now, we assert that possession in perfection of all the first four (presentative) kinds of action by no means implies the possession of the last two (representative) kinds. All persons, we think, must admit the truth of the following proposition:

Two faculties are distinct, not in degree but in kind, if we may possess the one in perfection without that fact implying that we possess the other also. Still more will this be the case if the two faculties tend to increase in an inverse ratio. Yet this is the distinction between the instinctive and the intellectual parts of man's nature.

As to animals, we fully admit that they may possess all the first four groups of actions-that they may have, so to speak, mental images of sensible objects combined in all degrees of complexity, as governed by the laws of association. We deny to them, on the other hand, the possession of the last two kinds of mental action. We deny them, that is, the power of reflecting on their own existence or of enquiring into the nature of objects and their causes. We deny that they know that they know or know themselves in knowing. In other words, we deny them reason. The possession of the presentative faculty, as above explained, in no way implies that of the reflective faculty; nor does any amount of direct operation imply the power of asking the reflective question before mentioned, as to what' and 'why.' According