Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/351

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
HUXLEY'S LIFE AND WORK.
343

under the title of Ichthyopsida. At the same time he showed that the Mammalia were not derived from the Sauropsida, but formed two diverging lines springing from a common ancestor. And besides this great generalization, says the Royal Society obituary notice, "the importance of which, both from a classificatory and from an evolutional point of view, needs no comment, there came out of the same researches numerous lesser contributions to the advancement of morphological knowledge, including, among others, an attempt, in many respects successful, at a classification of birds."

In conjunction with Tyndall, he communicated to the 'Philosophical Transactions' a memoir on glaciers, and his interest in philosophical geography was also shown in his popular treatise on physiography.

But it would be impossible here to go through all his contributions to science. The Royal Society Catalogue enumerates more than a hundred, every one of which, in the words of Prof. S. Parker, "contains some brilliant generalization, some new and fruitful way of looking at the facts of science. The keenest morphological insight and inductive power are everywhere apparent; but the imagination is always kept well in hand, and there are none of those airy speculations—a liberal pound of theory to a bare ounce of fact—by which so many reputations have been made." Huxley never allowed his study of detail to prevent him from taking a wide general view.

I now come to his special work on Man.

In the 'Origin of Species,' Darwin did not directly apply his views to the case of Man. No doubt he assumed that the considerations which applied to the rest of the animal kingdom must apply to Man also, and I should have thought must have been clear to every one, had not Wallace been in some respects, much to my surprise, of a different opinion. At any rate, it required some courage to state this boldly, and much skill and knowledge to state it clearly.

He put it in a manner which was most conclusive, and showed, in Virchow's words, "that in respect of substance and structure Man and the lower animals are one. The fundamental correspondence of human organization with that of animals is at present universally accepted."

This, I think, is too sweeping a proposition. It may be true for Germany, but it certainly is not true here. Many of our countrymen and countrywomen not only do not accept, they do not even understand, Darwin's theory. They seem to suppose him to have held that Man was descended from one of the living Apes. This, of course, is not so. Man is not descended from a Gorilla or an Orang-utang, but Man, the Gorilla, the Orang-utang and other Anthropoid Apes are all descended from some far-away ancestor.

"A Pliocene Homo skeleton," Huxley said, "might analogically be expected to differ no more from that of modern men than the Œningen