follows, with equal cogency, that when this point is reached an entirely new chapter is opened in the history of the evolution of life. A race which maintains itself by psychical variations can never, by natural selection, give rise to a race specifically different from itself in a zoological sense. It may go on adding increments to its intelligence until it evolves Newtons and Beethovens, while its physical structure will undergo but slight and secondary modifications. Obviously the first beginning of such a race of creatures, though but a slight affair zoölogically, was, in the history of the world, an event quite incomparable in importance with any other instance of specific genesis that ever occurred. It constituted a new departure, so to speak, not inferior in value to the first beginning of organic life. From Mr. Spencer's researches into the organisation of correspondences in the nervous system it follows that the general increase of intelligence cannot be carried much farther than it has reached in the average higher mammalia without necessitating the genesis of infancy. The amount of work to be done by the developing nervous system of the offspring, in reproducing the various combinations achieved by the parental nervous system, becomes so considerable that it cannot all be performed before birth. A considerable

and increasing number of combinations have to be adjusted after birth; and thus arise the phenomena of infancy. Among mammalia the point at which this change becomes observable lies between the true monkeys and the man-like apes. The orang-outang is unable to walk until a month old, and its period of babyhood lasts considerably longer.

The establishment of infancy is the most important among the series of events which resulted in the genesis of man. For, on the one hand, the prolongation of this period of immaturity had for its direct effect the liberation of intelligence from the shackles of rigid conservatism by which the unchecked influence of heredity had hitherto confined it. On the other hand, as its indirect effect, the prolongation of the period of helplessness served to inaugurate social life by establishing the family, and thus prepared the way for the development of the moral sense. It is by following out this line of inquiry that we shall elucidate the question of the causes of man's enormous intellectual superiority over his nearest zoological congeners. Meanwhile, and until further light shall have been thrown upon such incidental questions as the inventiveness displayed in the origin of language, the Darwinian is in nowise debarred, by any logical necessity of his position, from fully recognising the

fact of this enormous superiority. Writers like Dr. Bateman argue as if they supposed Darwinians to be in the habit of depicting the human race as a parcel of naked, howling troglodytes. They "point with pride" to Parthenons and Iliads, and ask us to produce from his African forests some gorilla who can perform the like. These worthy critics should first try to grasp the meaning of the contrast, that while zoölogically man presents differences from the higher catarrhine apes that are barely of generic value, on the other hand the psychological difference is so great as, in Mr. Mivart's emphatic language, to transcend the difference between an ape and a blade of grass. After duly reflecting on this, with the aid to be derived from Mr. Wallace's suggestion above cited, they will perhaps be able to comprehend how it is that the Darwinian, without ignoring the immensity of this difference, seeks, nevertheless, by working hypotheses to bring it out of the region of barren mystery into that of scientific interpretation. When they have once got this through their heads such trash as Dr. Bateman's will no longer get published.

November 1878.

IV.

DR. BÜCHNER ON DARWINISM.1

THE words "materialist" and "atheist" have been so long employed as death-dealing epithets in the hands of hard-hitting theological controversialists, that it seems hardly kind in us to begin the notice of a somewhat meritorious book by saying that it is the work of a materialist and an atheist. We are reassured, however, by the reflection that these are just the titles which the author himself delights in claiming. Dr. Büchner would regard it as a slur upon his mental fitness for philosophising if we were to refuse him the title of atheist; and "materialism" is the name of that which is as dear to him as "liberty" was dear to the followers of Danton and Mirabeau.

1 Man in the Past, Present, and Future. A Popular Account of the Results of Recent Scientific Research as regards the Origin, Position, and Prospects of the Human Race. From the German of Dr. L. Büchner, by W. S. Dallas, F.L.S. London, 1872.

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Accordingly, in applying these terms to Dr. Büchner, they become divested of their old opprobriousness, and are enabled to discharge the proper function of descriptive epithets by serving as abstract symbols for certain closely allied modes of thinking. Considered in this purely philosophical way, an "atheist" is one to whom the time-honoured notion of Deity has become a meaningless and empty notion; and a "materialist" is one who regards the story of the universe as completely and satisfactorily told when it is wholly told in terms of matter and motion, without reference to any ultimate underlying Existence, of which matter and motion are only the phenomenal manifestations. To Dr. Büchner's mind the criticism of the various historic conceptions of godhood has not only stripped these conceptions of their anthropomorphic vestments, but has left them destitute of any validity or solid content whatever; and in similar wise he is satisfied with describing the operations of nature, alike in the physical and psychical worlds, as merely the redistributions of matter and motion, without seeking to answer the inquiry as to what matter and motion are, or how they can be supposed to exist as such at all, save in reference to the mind by which they are cognised.

Starting, then, upon this twofold basis,-that the