and he is all the wiser and happier if he care for none—is that of about a dozen men: two or three in these islands, as many in America, and half a dozen on the Continent. If these think well of his work, his reputation is secure from all the attacks cf all the able editors of all the "influential organs" put together. So that I do not suppose that Mr. Darwin troubles himself much about this charge of dishonest reticence, which would be so ludicrous if it were not so shameful to its author; and I have thought it worth while to expose its foolish falsity merely in the interests of the honor of English journalism, in the hope of putting a stop to such malpractices, by calling the attention of the public to the most conspicuous lapse from that honor which has happened within my recollection.
The book, the title of which heads this article, Haeckel's "Anthropogenie" is remarkable in many ways: not least as a milestone, indicating the progress of the application of the theory of Evolution to Man, since Darwin set us all to thinking afresh upon that subject.
The position I took up, in 1863, was a very guarded one, as the state of knowledge at that time demanded. All I had to say came to this: If there is reason to believe that the lower animals have come to be what they are by a process of gradual modification, then there is nothing in the structure of man to warrant us in denying that he may have come into existence by the gradual modification of a mammal of ape-like organization. And, of the many criticisms with which my little book has been favored here and abroad, I have met with none which, in the slightest degree, shakes that position.
Prof. Haeckel stoops at much higher game. His theme is "Anthropogeny"—the tracing of the actual pedigree of man—from its protoplasmic root, sodden in the mud of seas which existed before the oldest of the fossiliferous rocks were deposited, in those inconceivably ancient days, which, for this earth, at any rate, were the real juventus mundi, to its climax and perfection—say in an anonymous critic of strict orthodoxy and high moral tone.
It need hardly be said that, in dealing with such a problem as this, science rapidly passes beyond the bounds of positive verifiable fact, and enters those of more or less justifiable speculation. But there are very few scientific problems, even of those which have been, and are being, most successfully solved, which have been, or can be, approached in any other way.
Our views respecting the nature of the planets, of the sun and stars, are speculations which are not, and cannot be, directly verified; that great instrument of research, the atomic hypothesis, is a speculation which cannot be directly verified; the statement that an extinct animal, of which we know only the skeleton, and never can know any more, had a heart and lungs, and gave birth to young which were developed in such and such a fashion, may be one which admits of no reasonable doubt, but it is an unverifiable hypothesis. I may be
