force of the thumb disappears. The organ, instead of being perfected, is degraded; scarcely can the long hooked fingers, when bent, touch one by one the unguial extremity of the thumb; the nail which terminates them is short, deformed, inflexible; it the hand) is already a claw."

He goes on to show that it is not adapted to sense or touch, or to the acquisition of intellectual ideas,-but to the cylindrical boughs of a tree, from its curving and hook-like shape. Besides, this hand is the habitual organ of a quadrupedal motion, and its true resting place is not the ground, but trees. The hand is free only when the animal is at rest. He then remarks:

"What a difference is there in the hand of man! The thumb becomes larger; it acquires a prodigious force and a freedom almost without bounds. Its tactile ball opposes itself with complete independence, simultaneously, or turn by turn, to those of all the other fingers. These, covered at their extremities with elastic nails, realize all the conditions of an organ proper to measure the intensity of pressure. The palm of the hand of an ape can only apply itself to a cylinder; that of the human hand is able to hollow itself into a longitudinal gutter, or to fashion itself into a cup, in such a manner that it can apply itself to spherical surfaces. From a simple prehensile organ it becomes a measuring instrument;-from a hook it becomes a compass (an expression used by Blainville), and the compass presupposes the geometrician. Elle saisissait jusque là le sol ou l'aliment; desormais, passez moi le mot, elle pourra saisir aussi des idées."

Mr. Huxley concludes his essay by a critical examination of the Brain, which, he thinks, illustrates the truth of his proposition more clearly than either the Hand or Foot, and "enforces the same conclusion in a still more striking manner." In comparing the Simian brain with the human, he drops the Gorilla, and very properly takes the Chimpanzee and the Ourang, as the highest exemplars. We are surprised that he had not, from the first, recognized these animals as the most elevated of the Ape family, instead of the Gorilla. Apart from the statements of our countrymen, Dr. Savage and Mr. Ford, published in 1847 and 1852, little was known of this brute till Mr. Du Chaillu brought to this country his interesting collection. Those who have seen his skeletons and stuffed specimens of the Gorilla, will remember the exceedingly brutal aspect of this animal, which accords well with Du Chaillu's

statements in regard to its brutal ferocity. Except in size, and in the less length of its fore limbs, it departs much farther, in structure, from the human standard, than do the Chimpanzee, the Ourang, or even the Gibbon; and is much inferior to them in intelligence, as well as in physical organization.

Mr. Huxley demonstrates, in the Chimpanzee and the Ourang, the existence, to some extent, of the third lobe of the brain, the posterior cornu of the lateral ventricle, and the hippocampus minor, all of which were held by Owen to be peculiar characteristics of the human brain.

So far as cerebral structure goes, he says, "that the difference between the brains of the Chimpanzee and of Man is almost insignificant, when compared with that between the Chimpanzee brain and that of a Lemur." This we may consider as true, since these animals, though embraced in the same Order, are almost as widely removed from one another as a Bear is from a Bat, which are also both in the same Order. But Mr. Huxley admits that there is a structural difference, though comparatively small, and freely acknowledges the "very striking difference in absolute mass and weight, between the lowest human brain, and that of the highest Ape."

This difference is indeed immense, when we consider that one of the skulls measured by Morton, contained 114 cubic inches, while the most capacious Gorilla skull, according to Mr. Huxley, contains not more than 34 inches. An ordinary child of four years old has a brain, absolutely, twice as large, and relatively ten times as large as an adult Gorilla. Mr. Huxley considers that this immense difference of size "is a very noteworthy circumstance, and doubtless will one day help to furnish an explanation of the great gulf which intervenes between the lowest man and the highest ape, in intellectual power." p. 120. We wish to call the reader's particular attention to this quotation, in connection with the note which accompanies it, in order to show the specious sophistry with which Mr. Huxley, throughout this book, endeavors to get up a case for the popu

* Lemur, a nocturnal carniverous animal. resembling the fox, but presenting many varieties of form. They are classed among the Quadrumana,-but Cuvier classes the flying Lemur among the Bats.

lar mind, and in order also to point out an admission, fatal to his doctrine, of man being a developed ape.

From this quotation we might infer that he considered the brain of an ape and that of a man to differ only in quantity or quality, and not in structure, and that the present "great gulf" would be bridged over, when we discovered other apes, recent or fossil, with more capacious skulls. But in the note, he tells us plainly, that this is not his meaning :

"For I by no means believe (he says) that it was any original difference of cerebral quality or quantity, which caused that diver gence between the human and the pithecoid stirpes, which has ended in the present enormous gulf between them.".

The long note from which the above is extracted, is directed against an objection founded on the argument that all difference of function is a result of difference of structure (which he does not deny) and therefore that "the vast intellectual chasm," which he admits to exist between Man and the Apes, implies a correspondingly vast structural chasm between their brains. In combating this argument, he incautiously goes on to show, that the immense difference between a Man's intelligence and an Ape's, is caused by speech and some peculiarity in the structure of their brains, so slight as to escape notice. He illustrates his own opposing argument by the example of the "great gulf" existing between a watch that keeps accurate time, and one that will not go at all, in consequence of some very slight physical alteration. Thus, he says,—

"A hair in the balance-wheel, a little rust on a pinion, a bend in a tooth of the escapement, a something so slight that only the practised eye of the watch-maker can discover it, may be the source of all the difference. And believing as I do with Cuvier, that the possession of articulate speech is the grand distinctive character of man, (whether it be absolutely peculiar to him or not,) I find it very easy to comprehend, that some equally inconspicuous structural difference may have been the primaary cause of the immeasurable and practically infinite divergence of the Human from the Simian Stirps." See Note on p. 122.

Now Mr. Huxley, in the above note, very plainly admits a distinctive fundamental difference between men and apes; and the reader might reasonably conclude, that he had abandoned,

in despair, his position of Man's unity with the brutes, since he acknowledges a structural difference, which places an immeasurable chasm between them. Such is the clear teaching of the note; but we have yet to learn all the capabilities of Mr. Huxley's "vast argument," and the flexibility of his peculiar logic. Notwithstanding the fatal concessions contained in his foot note, he maintains in his text precisely the same position of Man's unity with the Apes, and finds in the immense disparity in the weight of their brains, additional confirmation. He also employs precisely the same invariable argument, save only in this case he bases it, not as before on differences among apes, but on differences among men themselves.

Taking the admissions in his note, in connection with the text to which it is appended, his position and argument stand thus-The immense size of the human brain, the peculiarity of its structure, and the distinctive faculty of speech, which cause an "immeasurable and practically infinite divergence of the Human from the Simian Stirps," are all of "little systematic value," in assigning to Man a distinct place in Nature, or a different origin from an Ape. Why? Because "the difference in the weight of brain between the highest and the lowest men is far greater, both relatively and absolutely, than that between the lowest man and the highest ape." In other words, because the largest brained man among European philosophers (Cuvier for instance,) surpasses, in the size of his brain and intelligence, the most debased specimen of a semi-idiotic tribe of Bosjemen, as much as the latter surpasses the highest ape, therefore, he concludes that this fact furnishes additional proof that Man belongs to the same Order as the monkey, and is the production of a gorilla!

According to this reasoning, the more a civilized man becomes developed by cultivation, and the more strongly he manifests that unlimited capability of improvement which is distinctive of human nature, the greater is the evidence of his bestial origin. For it is apparent, that if the human race

*Cuvier's brain (the heaviest male brain on record) weighed 1861 French grammes, nearly 5 lbs., Troy weight.

were now composed entirely of men as degraded as the lowest Bosjeman, there would be no room for Mr. Huxley's comparison of differences, nor for the illogical inference which he draws from the superiority of the civilized over the savage brain. Under this condition of universal degradation, the "infinite divergence" which he admits to exist between the lowest Bosjeman and the highest Ape, would have to be considered evidence of diversity of nature and origin. For, even if he maintained, as he does in the text, that the size of the brain is of little systematic value, yet its "structural difference" and the faculty of speech, which he acknowledges in his note, and to which other still more distinctive characteristics might be added, would, upon Mr. Huxley's own principles, sufficiently establish this diversity.

But, because Man has been degraded from a superior state to the condition of a semi-idiotic Bosjeman, or because from some inherent principle of improvableness, he is capable of unlimited progress in the scale of elevation, for it matters not which theory is adopted, therefore, according to Mr. Huxley, the great disparity between the civilized and the savage brain, becomes a logical part of that "vast argument, fraught with the deepest consequences," which he proposes to unfold, in order to prove that Man is descended from a monkey!

Is the "enormous gulf" between the lowest Bosjeman and the highest ape rendered any less, because there are Europeans who exceed him in the size of the brain and in intelligence, as much as he exceeds a gorilla? Is savage man to be classed with the brutes because civilized man is proportionally elevated above him? Does his capability of unlimited improvement bridge the "great gulf" between him and the gorilla, and prove identity of nature? What logical connection is there between his premiss, based upon this superiority of Man's nature, and his conclusion that he is therefore of bestial origin? Who can fail to see the utter absurdity of such an argument, applied to determine Man's true position in nature, and his relationship to the universe of things? For it must be well remembered that this is the great question (not his anatomical position) which our author proposes to solve by this argument,