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No. 18

THE INDEX – AUGUST 27, 1874

Mr. M. D. Conway has an almost infallible tact in putting into his letters from London just what the people hearabouts would like to read. In his latest, he refers to a rumor which had reached him in London concerning a lecturer who has recently traversed Ohio, speaking against darwinism, and resorting to the method of contemptuous personal illusions to Mr. Darwin himself. The lecturer has described Mr. Darwin as of so mean and degraded a presence as to justify the hypothesis that he may himself be the veritable missing link of his own philosophy. Besides, the comic pictorial papers in England have several times encouraged such an idea by depicting Mr. Darwin's head fastened to the body of an ape. In reply to all such representations Mr. Conway thinks it worthwhile to mention that the great writer is a man of the most impressive personal appearance.

"Large and noble in figure, he has a head and face much more likely to remind one who sees him of Michael Angelo's magnificent bust of Moses, in Rome, than of any inferior being. Mr. Darwin has not, indeed, any soft, pink white beauty; but his massive forehead, his dome like head, his blonde complexion, his long, flowing beard, are such as a physiognomist would pick out among a thousand as belonging to a man of mark." When Colonel Higginson saw Darwin a year or two ago he said that his appearance was best represented by the word "majesty." Darwin belongs to one of the oldest families in England, and in it, for many generations, there have been wealth, refinement, and the love of intellectual pursuits. His home is pervaded by that atmosphere of personal and social culture that is obtained only by generations of improvement. The English have a word which they use in a very definite sense. It is the word "gentlemen." It is the word by which they would describe Charles Darwin. Therefore he cannot be the missing link.—Christian Union. [New York (15 April): 251]