such latent potentialities, and the process of development of every individual animal is the unmistakeable manifestation of actual organic evolution and emergence of real from potential existence in each separate case.

It has recently been strongly asserted by Dr. H. Charlton Bastion,* that organic nature does manifestly contain within it these innate powers of developing new and definite forms, more or less like those existing in inorganic nature, as evidenced by crystallisation.

He has given detailed descriptions† of the most strange and startling direct transformations amongst the lower animals, including the direct evolution of Rotifers and Nematoid worms. Moreover, the evidence of the occurrence of sudden and direct transformations does not repose on Dr. Bastian's observations alone. Similar phenomena have been observed by M. Pineau, Mr. Jules Haime, M. T. C. Hildyard, Mr. Metcalf Johnson, Dr. Gros, and M. Nicolet.‡

It would be difficult and eminently unscientific summarily to reject such an accumulation of evidence. To do so simply on an account of à priori prejudice, reposing upon nothing better than negative testimony, would be in the highest degree unphilosophical.

Moreover, we have of late years become acquainted with the remarkable fact of the occasional sudden transformation of a certain large Mexican Eft with external gills-the Axolotlinto an animal not only of a different species but of a different genus. Here the whole structure, the arrangement even of certain bones and distribution of the teeth in the jaws becomes transformed without the most careful observations having as yet enabled us to discover what conditions determine in these exceptional cases such a marvellous metamorphosis.

It is true that the Axolotl has characters of immaturity, and that the form ultimately attained by it is probably the fullydeveloped condition; but the wonder is thus only increased, since while the ordinary and immature Axolotls breed freely, the rarely developed adults are absolutely sterile.

To return from this digression, however, to the question of the cause and mode of specific origin. I have elsewhere § endeavoured to show, by many different facts, what the teaching of nature as to such origin—namely, that very frequently indeed similarity of structure may arise without there being any genetic

* "The Beginnings of Life," 1872.

+ L. c. vol. ii. pp. 307–540.

For an account of their observations and references to their original statements, see Bastian," Op. cit., vol. ii. pp. 493-527.

66

§ "Genesis of Species," 2nd edition, 1872.

*

affinity between the resembling forms, as also that it is much rather to an internal cause or principle,† than to any action of surrounding external conditions that the origin of new specific forms is due.

The characters and relations exhibited to us by the history of the highest order of mammals-the order Primates, common to us and to the Apes-seems then not only fully to corroborate, but to accentuate and intensify the arguments advanced in the "Genesis of Species" in support of what the author believes

The Axolotl seen above, and also a view of the under-jaw and throat.

to be the more philosophical conception of the cause and nature of "specific genesis" generally.

Not only is there abundant reason to believe that Apes and Half-Apes have little if any closer genetic affinity than they have either with Lions or with Whales; but there is much evidence to support the belief that the Apes of the Old and of the New Worlds respectively (the Simiada and Cebidae) have

"Genesis of Species," p. 71, chap. iii., on the co-existence of closely similar structures of diverse origin.

† Op. Cit. p. 251. chap. xi., on Specific Genesis.

been created independently one of the other, and that the various common characters they exhibit are but paralle adaptive modifications, due simply to similarity as to the exigencies of life to which they are respectively exposed.

Fossil remains, as yet unknown, may bridge over the gulf at present existing between these families. It would be a bold thing to positively affirm that such will not be discovered when we reflect how very few are the extinct animals known to us compared with the vast multitudes which have existed, how very rarely animal remains are fossilized, and how very rarely again such fossils are both accessible and actually found. Nevertheless, the author believes that it is far more likely that tropical geological explorations may reveal to us latisternal Apes more human than any now existing, rather than that it will bring to our knowledge forms directly connecting the Simiada and Cebido.

To return from this digression, the question may be asked, "What is the bearing of all the foregoing facts on the origin and affinities of man?"

Man being, as the mind of each man may tell him, an existence not only conscious, but conscious of his own consciousness; one not only acting on inference, but capable of analysing the process of inference; a creature not only capable of acting well or ill, but of understanding the ideas "virtue" and "moral obligation" with their correlatives freedom of choice and responsibility-man being all this, it is at once obvious that the principal part of his being is his mental power.

In Nature there is nothing great but Man,
In Man there is nothing great but Mind.

We must entirely dismiss, then, the conception that mere anatomy by itself can have any decisive bearing on the question as to man's nature and being as a whole. To solve this question, recourse must be had to other studies; that is to say, to philosophy, and especially to that branch of it which occupies itself with mental phenomena-psychology.

But if man's being as a whole is excluded from our present investigation, man's body considered by itself, his mere "massa corporea," may fairly be compared with the bodies of other species of his zoological order, and his corporeal affinities thus estimated.

Let us suppose ourselves to be purely immaterial intelligences, acquainted only with a world peopled like our own, except that man had never lived on it, yet into which the dead body of a man had somehow been introduced.

We should, I think, consider such a body to be that of some

latisternal Ape, but of one much more widely differing from all the others than such others differ one from another amongst themselves. We should be especially struck with its vast brain, and we should be the more impressed by it when we noted how bulky was the body to which that brain belonged. We should be so impressed because we should have previously noted that, as a general rule, in backboned animals, the larger the bulk of the body the less the relative size of the brain. From our knowledge of the habits and faculties of various animals in relation to their brain structure, we should be led to infer that the animal man was one possessing great power of co-ordinating movements, and that his emotional sensibility would have been considerable. But above all, his powers of imagination would have been deemed by us to have been prodigious, with a corresponding faculty of collecting, grouping, and preserving sensible images of objects in complex and coherent aggregations to a degree much greater than in any other animal with which we were before acquainted. Did we know that all the various other kinds of existing animals had been developed one from another by evolution; did we know that the numerous species had been evolved from potential to actual existence by implanted powers in matter, aided by the influence of incident forces; then we might reasonably argue by analogy that a similar mode of origin had given rise to the exceptional being, the body of which we were examining.

If, however, it were made clear to us-immaterial intelligences-that the dead body before us had been, in life, animated, not by a merely animal nature, but by an active intelligence like our own, so that the difference between him and all other animals was not a difference of degree but of kind—if we could be made to understand that its vast power of collecting and grouping sensible images served but to supply it with the materials made use of by its intelligence to perceive, not merely sensible phenomena, but also abstract qualities of objects-if we became aware that the sounds uttered by it in life were not exclusively emotional expressions, but signs of general conceptions (such as predominate in the language of even the lowest savage), then the aspect of the question would be entirely altered for us.

We should probably decide that if the body before us seemed to us to be so little related to the informing rational soul that its existence anterior to and independent of such rational soul was quite conceivable and possible, then its origin by process of natural evolution would, indeed, also be conceivable and indeed à priori probable.

But if, on the other hand we were convinced, from whatever reason, that it was inconceivable and impossible for such a body

to be developed or exist without such informing soul, then we should with perfect reason and logic affirm that as no natural process would account for the entirely different kind of soul— one capable of articulately expressing general conceptions*so no merely natural process could account for the origin of the body informed by it-a body to which such an intellectual faculty was so essentially and intimately related.

Dropping now the metaphor of immaterial spirits, it seems that the answers supposed to be given by such spirits must be the answers really given by sincere and unbiassed investigators in the combined spheres of Zoology and Anthropology.

But however near to Apes may be the body of man, whatever the kind or number of resemblances between them, it should always be borne in mind that it is to no one kind of Ape that Man has any special or exclusive affinities-that the resemblances between him and lower forms are shared in not very unequal proportions by different species; and be the preponderance of resemblance in which species it may, whether in the Chimpanzee, the Siamang or the Orang, there can be no question that at least such preponderance of resemblance is not presented by the much vaunted Gorilla, which is no less a brute and no more a Man than is the humblest member of the family to which it belongs.

* "It is not emotional expressions or manifestations of sensible impressions, however exhibited, which have to be accounted for, but the enunciation of distinct deliberate judgments as to the what,' 'the how,' and 'the why,' by definite articulate sounds; and for these Mr. Darwin not only does not account, but he does not adduce anything even tending to account for them."

p. 79.

"Quarterly Review," July 1871. Article, "The Descent of Man,”