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SCIENCE

The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. By Charles Darwin, M.A. 2 vols. With Illustrations. (Murray.)

IN this work Mr. Darwin considers whether man, like every other species, has descended from some pre-existing form; the manner of his development in such assumed descent, and the value of the differences between the so-called races of men, without detailing these differences,—a subject which has been fully treated in many valuable works. To the action of Natural Selection, as explained in the well-known 'Origin of Species,' the author here adds an elaborate treatise on the influence of Sexual Selection, which indeed is the main characteristic of the present publication.

With reference to natural selection Mr. Darwin now admits that he has probably attributed too much to this principle in the earlier editions of his 'Origin of Species.' He had not formerly sufficiently considered the existence of many structures which appear to be, and have been shown by capable naturalists to be, neither beneficial nor injurious, and this he believes to be one of the greatest oversights yet detected in his work. "If," says he, "I have erred in giving to natural selection great power, which I am far from admitting, or in having exaggerated its power, which is in itself probable, I have at least, as I hope, done good service in aiding to overthrow the dogma of separate creations."

In noticing a book so replete with facts and arguments in the direction of the main issue, we can only hope to present a due through what is in truth a natural history maze. We can the more satisfactorily omit the details, inasmuch as the author himself confesses "this work contains hardly any original facts in regard to man." The literary merit of these volumes lies in the marshalling nd disposing in due order of a multitude of observations gathered from numerous inquirers, and from very numerous publications. All well-read naturalists will recognize the truth of the author's admission, and will be more interested in the uses to which he puts his materials than the sources from which he obtained them. The question is not their familiarity or their novelty, but the support they yield to the hypothetical structure erected upon them.

Mr. Darwin contends at the outset that the embryonic development of man, from an ovule which differs in no respect from the ovules of other animals; the fact of his bearing, together with all the higher animals, some parts in a rudimentary condition—some rudimentary organs distinguished from those which are nascent—such as the human oe coccyx, which, though functionless as a tail, plainly represents this part in other vertebrate animals; and then the homologous structures in man and the lower animals, which are so generally known to students of comparative anatomy, all combine to prove community of descent:—

"To take any other view (affirms our author) is to admit that our own structure or that of all the animals around us is a mere share laid to entrap our judgment. The time will before long come when it will be thought wounderful that naturalists who were well acquainted with the comparative structure and development of man and other mammals, should have believed that each was the work of a separate creation."

But the difference between the mental powers of man and of all other animals is enormous, even when we contrast the mind of one of the lowest savages with that of the most highly-organized ape; and to obviate this formidable objection a chapter is devoted to an attempt to show that there is so fundamental difference between man and the higher animals in their mental faculties. A man possesses the same senses as the lower animals; his fundamental intuitions must be the same; but he has, perhaps, somewhat fewer instincts than those possessed by the animals which come next to him in the series. On the lower faculties supposed to be held in common it will be needless to dwell, but on the more intellectual emotions and faculties which form the basis for the development of the higher powers we must dwell for a moment. All animals enjoy excitement and suffer from ennui; they all feel wonder, and many of them exhibit curiosity. The principle of imitation is strong in man, and animals sometimes imitate each other's actions. Attention, so important for intellectual progress, is clearly seen in animals, as in a cat watching at a hole for a mouse. Excellent memories for persons and places are common to baboons and dogs; and as cats, dogs, horses and many higher animals have vivid dreams, so they are subject to imagination. As to that high faculty of the human mind which we name reason, few dispute that animals possess it in some degree.

The faculty of Progressive Improvement has often and long been declared peculiar to man; so also has the employment of tools, the kindling of fire, and some other similar capacities. But Mr. Darwin cites instances to the contrary—few enough indeed, and plainly exceptional, or extremely radimentary. But when Mr. Darwin arrives at Language—articulate speech—his ingenuity fails him, as fail it must, though be declares that "the faculty of articulate speech does not offer any insuperable objections to the belief that man has been developed from some lower form."

There is manifest weakness in the endeavour to break down the distinctive human faculties of Self-consciousness, Individuality. Abstraction, the power of forming general ideas, and the like. As respects Belief in God and Religion, it is common to refer to the love of a dog for its master as a distant approach to a kind of canine devotion, but it is absurd to make this an argument in the case; and what is said about savages is beside the mark as to true religion and true belief in God. In fact, the writers who, before Mr. Darwin, and at far greater length, have attempted to advance in this direction have signally failled. No man will ever develope religion out of a dog or Christianity out of a cat. Attempts of this nature must always be weak, and sometimes ludicrous.

The Moral Sense again has very generally been regarded as distinctively human. Twenty-six British authors have written on this subject, and there is no need of a twenty-seventh, even though Mr. Darwin thinks it "in a high degree probable that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man." Of course this comes to nothing, for no animal exists so endowed, and as far as we can read the ideas of apes and monkeys, they are certainly at least as strikingly deficient in a moral sense as any animal below them. It is amusing to note how so accomplished a naturalist as Mr. Darwin slides almost into the puerile while he upholds the ideas of sympathy, sociability, and moral goodness amongst animals: "I have myself seen a dog, who never passed a great friend of his,

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a cat which lay sick in a basket, without giving her a few licks with his tongue, the surest sign of kind feeling in a dog." As to a conscience in dogs in general, no man of experience and common sense believes in a canine conscience any more than in a legal conscience. There are indeed some few exceptional cases of conscientious dogs and conscientious lawyers; but these do not prove the rule.

Although Mr. Darwin has made ample and able use of the naturalists and anthropologists who have preceded him, and who still surround him, it is in all that relates to the development by evolution, or by natural selection, of moral and intellectual faculties and emotions that he is manifestly feeblest. He does his best, but he rows against wind and tide. The instincts and hopes and faith of cultivated mankind are against him; and though he may call Mr. Herbert Spencer or any other clever theorist into his boat to take an oar with him, he must fail. An evolutionist of the Darwinian order is bound to go further than the moral sense and the intellectual faculties if he believes in the existence of the human soul; and though Mr. Darwin may affirm that psychology forms no part of his province, yet it does constitute an integral part of mental science, of which he does partially treat. As certainly as we evolve sex, so certainly must we evolve soul. If the former be due purely to natural selection, so is the latter. We cannot stop short of the whole being of man in unfolding any theory which is intended to account for a large portion of his being. A consistent and credible theory of development must manifestly develope every constituent of the subject, and if it falls short of the highest it may be rejected, even if it fits the lowest.

Let us attempt to discover the proper moment for the introduction of a moral sense, a soul, or anything of the kind, or indeed of any of the most ennobling endowments of self-conscious and cultivated man in Mr. Darwin's ideal picture of our poor originals, a part of which we quote, with the omission of a few words that might displease the fastidious:—

"The early progenitors of man were no doubt once covered with hair, both sexes having beards; their ears were pointed, and capable of movement, and their bodies were provided with a tail, having the proper muscles. Their limbs and bodies were also acted upon by many muscles which now only occasionally re-appear, but are nominally present in the Quadrumana. The great artery and nerve of the humerus ran through a supracondyloid foramen. At this or some earlier period, the intestine gave forth a much larger diverticulum or cœcum than that now existing. The foot, judging from the condition of the great toe in the fœtus, was then prehensile; and our progenitors, no doubt arboreal in their habits, frequenting some warm, forest-clad land. The males were provided with great canine teeth, which served them as formidable weapons.... At a much earlier period the uterus was double. The eye was protected by a third eyelid or nictitating membrane. At a still earlier period the progenitors of man must have been aquatic in their habits; for morphology plainly tells us that our lungs consist of a modified swim-bladder, which ones served as a float. The clefts on the neck in the embryo of man show whers the branchiæ ones existed. At about this period the true kidneys were replaced by the corpora wolffiana. The heart existed as a simple pulsating vessel; and the chords dorsalis took the place of a vertebral column. These early predecessors of man, thus seen in the dim recesses of time, must have been as lowly organized as the lancelet or amphioxus, or even still more lowly organized. There is one other point deserving a fuller notice. It has long been known that in the vertebrate kingdom one sex bears rudiments of various accessory parts appertaining to the reproductive system, which properly belong to the opposite sex; and it has been ascertained that at a very early embryonic period both sexes possess true male and female glands. Hence some extremely remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom appears to have been hermaphrodite or androgynous. But here we encounter a singular difficulty."

We decline to continue the extract, and those who wish further details must have recourse to the book. Enough has been cited to display the outlines of our peculiar and remote progenitors. Doubtless Prof Gegenbaur and other advanced, or rather retrograde, comparative anatomists afford support to Mr. Darwin, but here we have only to deal with himself, and ordinary readers will be satisfied with this extract. A great desideratum, however, is lacking, namely, an illustrative sketch or two of such a remarkable ancestry, with particular delineations of the tail.

As to the appearance of man:—

"The world," continues our present author, "it has often been remarked, appears as if it had long been preparing for the advent of man; and this, in one sense, is strictly true, for he owes his birth to a long line of progenitors. If any single link in this chain had never existed, man would never have been what he now is. Unless we wilfully close our eyes, we may with our present knowledge, approximately recognize our parentage; nor need we feel ashamed of it."

Perhaps not, but then why should we feel ashamed of tails? Why was Lord Monboddo so unmercifully ridiculed for asserting that they were our original appendage? Why, according to natural selection, should they have been eliminated? for plainly they would have been in every respect extremely serviceable, if not highly ornamental, even in our day. In climbing the Alps, for instance, how very useful a long prehensile tail would have been, as we may any day see in the practice of monkeys at the Zoological Gardens. By means of his tail, many a climber now killed might have saved his life. Here, too, it occurs to us that the unaccountable passion for ascending mountains is a strong testimony to our direct descent from the Simian race, whose propensity to run up trees is notorious.

We scarcely know how to deal with Sexual Selection, the author's strong point and long treatise, occupying about a third of the first and very nearly the whole of the second volume. It is both a delicate and a difficult subject, and cannot be discussed within moderate limits. At present we must limit ourselves to a few observations, which may be subsequently expanded and justified as opportunity occurs.

Naturalists who believe in the mutability of species, and natural selection as an agency to it, find many things unaccounted for, and may adopt sexual selection as a supplementary factor, or a co-operant factor, if such a term be preferred. This works in numerous modes in the higher animals, though not at all in the lowest; for in the lowest classes the two sexes are not rarely united in the same individual, and where they are separate both are permanently attached to some support. Sexual selection implies that the more attractive individuals are preferred by the opposite sex; and that where the sexes differ, it is, with rare exceptions, the male which is most ornamental and which departs most from the type to which the species belongs. We observe this in insects, and more notably still in higher animals; and hereby we are presumed to be able to account for numerous changes in the course of development and descent.

Colours, character, beauty, and masculine pugnacity and supremacy seem to be some consequences of sexual selection, not only in insects, but also in fishes, amphibians, reptiles. When we come to birds, many evidences and results of this principle are more apparent; for amongst birds we recognize laws of battle, special weapons and vocal organs.

In the four chapters on birds, a great number of curious observations are accumulated, such as that even the most pugnacious and best armed males rarely or never depend for success solely on their power to drive away or kill their rivals, but have special means for charming the female. The power of song, the emission of strange cries, or other curiously diversified means for producing various sounds, are notable accompaniments of ornithological courtship. Many birds, indeed, endeavour to charm the females by love-dances, or antics, performed on the ground or in the air, and sometimes at prepared places; while ornaments of many kinds, the most brilliant tints, combs and wattles, beautiful plumes, and elongated feathers and top-knots are common attractions. But allowing this to be true and pleasing, it cannot be a general ornithic law, since ugly birds, like rooks and vultures, court as successfully as beautiful birds. If weapons for battle, organs for producing sound, or any kind of ornaments, and bright and conspicuous colours, have, as Mr. Darwin assumes, generally been acquired by the male through variation and sexual selection, and have been transmitted in various ways, according to the laws of inheritance, then unsightly birds ought to have improved in the like ratio, and either there ought to be no ugly birds at all, or they ought to be observably improving in beauty of plumage, in song, and in all attractiveness to their mates.

Numerous highly amusing particulars are given respecting birds, their feathers, their taste for the beautiful, and their courtship. What chances of acceptance and what charms the sexes respectively have are fully detailed; and it is singular to note that cocks and hens strikingly resemble men and women in amatory affairs. In fact, there are preferences and anti-pathies, propriety and profligacy, monogamy and polygamy amongst birds as amongst ourselves. The birds are more human than the mammals, for amongst the latter the male wins the female much more through the law of battle than by the display of his charms, as the bird does. The law of battle for possession of the female prevails through the whole great class of mammals.

The primary and secondary sexual characteristics of mammals are specified; and it seems that the law of equal transmission of the characters of both sexes, as concerns colour and other ornaments, has prevailed far more extensively with mammals than with birds; while in regard to weapons, such as horns and tusks, these have often been transmitted exclusively or in a much higher degree to the male than to the female. Their absence in females, by hypothesis, is the result of the form of inheritance which has prevailed.

Amongst mankind, sexual differences are

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greater than in most species of Quadrumana, though not so great as in some. The law of battle remains only with barbarous nations; amongst the civilized the competition assumes a different form. "The half-human male progenitors of man, and men in a savage state, have struggled together during many generations for the possession of the females."

Most of those characteristics of the sexes which have been regarded, Mr. Darwin reduces to the secret of derivation by sexual selection. One may be instanced: "Absence of hair on the body is, to a certain extent, a secondary sexual character; for in all parts of the world women are less hairy than men. Therefore, we may reasonably suspect that this is a character which has been gained through sexual selection." The subsequent reasoning on female hairlessness is certainly as weak as any in the volume: "We know that the faces of several species of monkeys, and large surfaces at the posterior end of the body in other species, have been denuded of hair; and this we may safely attribute to sexual selection; for these surfaces are not only vividly coloured, but sometimes, as with the male mandrill and female rhesus, much more vividly in the one sex than the other." The author then proceeds to infer that our female semi-human progenitors were probably first partially divested of hair, and that, as they gradually acquired this new character of nudity, they transmitted it in an almost equal degree to their young offspring of both sexes. "There is nothing surprising in a partial loss of hair having been esteemed as ornamental by the ape-like progenitors of man; for we havseen that with animals of kinds innumerable strange characters have been thus esteemed, and have consequently been modified, through sexual selection."

With any one who accepts this as a sufficient, or even probable, explanation, it would be useless to reason. Curiously, too, Mr. Wallace, the supporter, if not the originator, of natural selection, actually regards the hairless condition of the skin as a proof "that some intelligent power has guided or determined the development of man."

We have given such a draft of Mr. Darwin's plan, and such specimens of his arguments, as our present limits will allow, and while we differ from him in many things, we certainly agree with him in this one: "The views here advanced, on the part which sexual selection has played in the history of man, want scientific precision. He who does not admit this agency in the case of the lower animals will properly disregard all that I have written in the later chapters on man." We have given several hours of careful attention to this topic, as well as several hours to other topics in these two volumes, and we cannot refrain from an expression of regret that so vain a parade should have been made of the presumed effects of sexual selection. Our impression is, that the exaggeration is great, and that the lack of soundness and coherence in the arguments is manifest. Many of the statements are true enough, but they are not necessarily constituents of the hypothesis, nor do they really support it. Other statements we should unequivocally deny, and then we should redistribute the facts alleged to their original places, or re-arrange them into quite a different edifice, and on a very different foundation.

Whoever will peruse these volumes apart from their ultimate aim, and totally disregard the author's hypotheses, will be highly pleased with them, and will readily acknowledge the patience and industry of the compiler of so many scattered facts in Natural History. We have, in this spirit, already twice read many pages, and hope twice to read many more. In this spirit too we are not concerned about vagueness or irrelativeness; we accept the volumes as a naturalist's miscellany, and are grateful for the entertainment they have afforded us.

 

[Also transcribed below are three clippings by the Irish draper and critic of Darwin Charles O'Shaughnessy (1826/7–1911?).]

DARWIN'S MONKEY.

TO THE EDITOR OF BASSETTS' DAILY CHRONICLE.

SIR.—I will be more correct in giving exact assertions from this learned author, for banter will no longer do when morality is at stake—nay more, Heaven and God's glory. To give the unfortunate gentleman credit, he does try to put things in a true light; but where no light is, no light can proceed from. Like all the other professors that I have confounded, he bases his theory on a hypothesis—while I deny all hypothesis that are not supported by observation (in temporal matters), for I hold that man has no temporal knowledge but what he, has received from observations, whether from man or brute. He says, "In attempting to trace the genealogy of man lower down in the series, we become involved in greater obscurity.… Every evolutionist," this is his hobby—"evolution," like Sir Issac Newton's "gravitation" and Laplace's "perturbation," and Herschell's "centripital," and somebody else's "centrifugal." If he could prove evolution his theory was carried. Every evolutionist will admit that the five great vertebrate classes,—namely, mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes, are descended from some one prototype, for they have much in commott, as the class of fishes is the most lowly organised and appeared before the others." Who told him this, or by what authority does he say there was a fish before a pig? "We may conclude," he says, "that all the others are derived from some fish animal."

Well, now, I begin to ask him one question regarding this assertion. What will be the probable "evolution" next of man as he has arrived at a position beyond all his "progenitors" of being erect, with his face capable of looking up to adore God? He must change according to the "evolutions," and will his next change be on his back?—and if he does not change he is a perfect being, destined for some great object in his present state.

As I will give only one proof of confutation in each letter, I will wait for an answer to this for three posts, and will continue the rest of his assertions daily.—Yours truly,

CHARLES O'SHAUGHNESSY.

Kilfinane, January 13, 1876.

DARWIN.

TO THE EDITOR OF BASSETTS' DAILY CHRONICLE.

SIR.—The learned professor says that "the fact of the higher apes using their vocal organs for speech, no doubt depends on their intelligence not having been sufficiently advanced. The possession by them of organs which, with long continued practice, might have been used for speech, although not thus used, is paralleled by the case of the nightingale and crow, having vocal organs similarly constructed, one using them for song, and the other for croaking."

This is verily a proof that "professor" man is always kept in the dark from God's handy-work, when two birds, of the same organs, use them differently for the enjoyment of man by variety.

Third question to Mr. Darwin.—What use would the brute creation be to man if it had not (as I will use the word), reason? They would not know how to protect themselves, nor to dread us, nor obey us and Adam would, indeed, be in a sad state under the circumstances, in the midst of unintelligent animals. I should not make such a statement about Adam, but the other questions I proposed opened the way for it, and it will not be easy to close it again. Religion and common-sense will at once say why not we be satisfied at the close approach of the brute creation to us, when the Creator gave as power over them, and gave us the comprehension to adore Him?

Darwin may ask, why have not the savages comprehension? And I answer, and say that when they only did like the brute creation they were allowed to roam like them and travel in the ungodly way of forgetful comprehension. Let any thinking man place himself, in imagination, on a continent where no commerce took place, and let a certain number of the community pass away from under his control to remote districts, where no religious influence was before them, how many generations would it take to have them become savages?—Yours truly,

CHARLES O'SHAUGHNESSY.

Kilfinane, January 19, 1876.

DARWIN CONTINUED.

TO THE EDITOR OF BASSETTS' DAILY CHRONICLE.

SIR.—I hope I am not boring your readers by continuing this work-out subject; but as I think over it, I am compelled, as it were, to ask him every question that has the power of baffling his learned intellect until I will set him asleep to dream to another theory.

He says—"I fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important. This sense, as Mackintosh remarks, has a rightful supremacy over every other principle of human action." This weak argument did suit his object, and hear to how he harps on it: "It is the most noble of all the attributes of man, leading him, without hesitation, to risk his life for that of a fellow creature."

This stood to him; for he knew that he could tell a story of a cat coming to take away her kittens at the risk of her life; or a rat leading a blind rat about a mill floor with a straw. So he confounds the above argument well by these and many ridiculous examples.

And here is his triumphant exultation on his proof—"This great question has been discussed by many writers of consummate ability, and my sole excuse for touching on it is the impossibility of here passing it over." I see clearly the reason he did not pass it over, because it was very easy to confound so silly an assertion, and he made a fiddle of it.

I give him a question that he will not get over so joyfully. How has a spider (with a brain not as big as atop of a needle) the power of intellect to baffle Mr. Darwin, and make its way into a hole, much wiser than Mr. Darwin himself, and think of it in an instant when it wants to avoid being killed? After this, what is the use of comparing the brains of man and the brute, when the brains of a spider are quicker than his own brains?—I am, yours truly,

CHARLES O'SHAUGHNESSY.

Kilfinane, January 19, 1876.

DARWIN CONTINUED.

TO THE EDITOR OF BASSETTS' DAILY CHRONICLE.

SIR.—Admitting that there was a time at a very remote period of a million years, or a thousand million years when, there was nothing on the earth but fishes, according to this great man, and those of the lowest order. This will please him and his friends the Geologists—great scholars they are.—Where, then, was the earth got? and where were the fishes got?

As this clever author was able to tell the reasoning of the dog on his lawn, he ought to be able to tell how this big mass of earth and rock and sand and gravel came. If he cannot, with all the glare of natural science that they boast of now, Mosses was an old fool in those uneducated ages to attempt doing it; and in some short time after we had men as wise as we have at present, and their advice stands good to-day as well as say we can get from as wise men as Mr. Darwin. How does all this occur? They never disputed it. Well, again, admitting that earth was millions of years old, was not time before it?

We all know that there is no comparison between time and eternity. We know that the human mind has not the power of comprehending eternity, for, as in all the words of God, He has kept that a secret from nuts. Then, as time was before it, and time and sternity bear no analogy do you think I will take the story of meteoric stones or the throwing up of land, or the upheaving of land as a contradiction of the Mossie history, and while the lard is more likely to be created in man's than in fish's day—I am, yours truly,

CHARLES O'SHAUGHNESSY.

Kilfinane, January 19, 1876.