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Letters to the Editor.

THE RELATION OF MAN TO THE LOWER ANIMALS.

Yesterday evening Professor Huxley, of the Government School of Mines, London, delivered the second of two lectures, "On the structural relations of man the other forms of animal life." He stated that in his first lecture he had endeavoured to illustrate the proposition that, whatever system of organs were considered, man, if compared with the highest of the apes, approached that animal far more nearly than the lowest apes approached the highest apes. On the former occasion he considered the external forms and proportions, and the chief characteristics of the bony skeleton. He had now to continue and conclude the subject by taking into consideration the structure and relative forms and proportions of two sets of organs, on which more stress had been laid than any others in the discussion of these questions—namely, first, the hand and foot; and second, the brain. The learned Professor accordingly proceeded, with the aid of numerous diagrams and anatomical preparations (including the skeleton and preserved brain of a chimpanzee, lent by Professor Goodsir from the Anatomical Museum), to show the relation of the human to the gorilla and the chimpanzee hand—pointing out the close resemblance of the gorilla's hand to man's; the less perfect resemblance in the hand of the chimpanzee, where the thumb was very short; and the apparent absence of a thumb in some of the lower species, in which, however, its rudiments were found on dissection. He went on to show the relations of the foot, remarking that apes were improperly designated by Cuvier quadrumana; for, taking bone for bone, and proportion for proportion, in the structure of the lower limb of the ape, it was a true foot, on precisely the same plan as the human foot. It had, however, a prehensile faculty which man's foot had altogether lost by enclosure in boots. The great toe, he pointed out, was only rudimentary in the orang's foot, and altogether there was a greater difference between the orang's and the gorilla's foot than between the gorilla's foot and man's. Speaking of the brain, he said it had been to him a matter of great surprise to find that there was so little to be seen, so far as anatomy went, between the brain of the higher apes and that of man. They might be sure his business here was not in any way to lower the dignity of human nature, or to lead his hearers to suppose that they were simply apes, but to state anatomical facts; and considering that, without doubt, the brain was the organ of the mind, and that there was great gulf fixed between the highest apes and the lowest of mankind in intellectual faculty, it was a very remarkable fact that, excepting in point of mass, there should be so very little difference discoverable. The minimum weight of the human brain was considered to be 310z., while the largest brain of any of the apes was 17 or 18—perhaps not more than 150z. The maximum weight of the human brain was about 640z., or double the minimum; so that, on the scale of proportion, there was no greater interval between the gorilla and lowest man and lowest man and highest man. In speaking of these matters, we yet spoke in total ignorance of the human race as it existed in the earlier epochs of the world's history. The time over which our knowledge of the structure of man extended was brief, viewed as geologic time, and not by the insignificant standard of civil history. It was only within the last few years or months that we had obtained clear and unmistakeable evidences of man in even the most recent of the geological formations. They had, however, discovered the traces, not of man, but of his works, in hatchets and other implements which, it was proved to demonstration, belonged to man as the contemporary of the great mammoth, and other animals that existed about the time of the great Drift. Yet, while no positive evidence of that period had been found, while even no fragment of a skull had been found, in connection with these implements, there was a most singular indication of what they might hope to find in geological records, if pushed further. Some time ago there was discovered in a cave, in the valley of Neanderthal, in Germany, a most remarkable human skull, associated with bones of the ordinary human size and proportion, but in which the mass of the brain must have been marvellously smaller than even the lowest Australian brain, and there were other marks about the skull, all of which had an approximation to the ape type. No one had been able to ascertain what its geologic age was, but he believed it was the first discovered relic of a race and variety of mankind older than any of which we had at present cognisance. It would be hazardous in the last degree for any cautious thinker to say how close the structure of the human and the simian brain might one day be found to approximate. Whatever system of organs they might study, he asserted that the same result would hold good, that the higher apes approached man more closely than the lower did to the higher apes. One of the daily papers, in noticing his first lecture, stated that it consisted of an advocacy of the views of Mr Darwin. He might be excused for saying that that was not quite the case. It had been his province in these two lectures simply to state facts. But he should be wanting in his duty did he state these facts baldly without drawing attention to what seemed to be their clear indication. He must not be misunderstood as saying that the differences between man and the apes were slight or insignificant. The very reverse of that was true. So far as our knowledge of existing creation went, no intermediate forms existed which bridged over the interval between the ape and the man. The highest ape and lowest man were as distinct from one another as were any two genera of allied families. But so was the orang from the gorilla, the lemur from the orang, and so on down to the rhinoceros and the horse. So that they might see to what conclusion all he had said tended; and therefore he gave a tacit amount of praise to the sagacity of his reporter. His conclusion was this, that if any physical causation could be discovered by which the existence of such animals as the gorilla, the orang, the lemur, the rhinoceros or the horse, was to be accounted for, this causation was also amply sufficient to account for the origin of man so far as he was an anatomical structure, for the organisation of man was not more different from that of the animals which approached to him most nearly, than that of the lemurs and other lower forms were from one another. Or finally, if Mr Darwin's hypothesis or any other would account for the origin of the gorilla, the orang, and the lemur from a common stock, then to the eye of an anatomist the origin of man presented no difficulty on account of any gap between him and the animals immediately below him. But, on the other hand, if they asked him whether he conceived Mr Darwin's hypothesis to be correct, and whether it would account for the origin of these animals from a common stock, then he replied frankly that Mr Darwin's hypothesis lacked one great link in the chain of proof. He had, he thought, satisfactorily proved that what he termed selection must and did occur in nature. He has also proved that the superfluity of this selection was competent to produce from one common stock forms which differed as much from one another as did our genera or species from the animals most nearly approaching us. But he had not yet proved that any form of selection could produce from one common stock forms which differed from one another so far that they would not breed with one another, which was one of the chief distinctions of species in nature. Mr Huxley went on to say that he simply viewed Mr Darwin's hypothesis as a key which helped to solve all sorts of riddles, and which he would not throw away so long as he had no other. Being the only key before him he adopted it, because it enabled the naturalist to group together a vast number of phenomena which would otherwise remain isolated and without meaning. The learned Professor concluded by an eloquently expressed analogy between the Alps upheaved from the lower strata of the earth's crust and towering above the plains, and man standing high above the lower animals, but sprung from the same level as his humbler compeers. The lecturer was listened to with deep attention by the audience.