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Professor Darwin's title for his new book, the more I think of it, appears to me most happily chosen. It certainly is the Descent of Man –even to the degrading level of a baboon. Those who accept the conclusions arrived at by this cynical philosopher, must regard as rapid that once radiant verse of Alexander Pope, in which the latter, referring to the angelic multitude in Heaven, says of them that –

"They show a Newton as we show an ape" –

the ape, according to Darwin, being the mere progenitor of Newton. Reading "Gulliver" by the light of this new philosophy, Swift's fiendish and brutal satire when depicting the Yahoos, would assume the character of a most sagacious and almost prescient foreshadowing of the Darwinian theory of Anthropology in its first rise and development. Very recently there was on view here, in London, a hairless horse, so that there could seem to be a chance of some astounding development in future for the Houyhnhnms, for even the despised race of the Yahoos, their serfs and attendants.

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