On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals
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Thomas H. Huxley >> On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals
We are indeed told by those who assume authority in these matters, that
the two sets of opinions are incompatible, and that the belief in the
unity of origin of man and brutes involves the brutalization and
degradation of the former. But is this really so? Could not a
sensible child confute by obvious arguments, the shallow rhetoricians
who would force this conclusion upon us? Is it, indeed, true, that the
Poet, or the Philosopher, or the Artist whose genius is the glory of
his age, is degraded from his high estate by the undoubted historical
probability, not to say certainty, that he is the direct descendant of
some naked and bestial savage, whose intelligence was just sufficient
to make him a little more cunning than the Fox, and by so much more
dangerous than the Tiger? Or is he bound to howl and grovel on all
fours because of the wholly unquestionable fact, that he was once an
egg, which no ordinary power of discrimination could distinguish from
that of a Dog? Or is the philanthropist or the saint to give up his
endeavours to lead a noble life, because the simplest study of man's
nature reveals, at its foundations, all the selfish passions and fierce
appetites of the merest quadruped? Is mother-love vile because a hen
shows it, or fidelity base because dogs possess it?
The common sense of the mass of mankind will answer these questions
without a moment's hesitation. Healthy humanity, finding itself hard
pressed to escape from real sin and degradation, will leave the
brooding over speculative pollution to the cynics and the 'righteous
overmuch' who, disagreeing in everything else, unite in blind
insensibility to the nobleness of the visible world, and in inability
to appreciate the grandeur of the place Man occupies therein.
Nay more, thoughtful men, once escaped from the blinding influences of
traditional prejudice, will find in the lowly stock whence Man has
sprung, the best evidence of the splendour of his capacities; and will
discern in his long progress through the Past, a reasonable ground of
faith in his attainment of a nobler Future.
They will remember that in comparing civilised man with the animal
world, one is as the Alpine traveller, who sees the mountains soaring
into the sky and can hardly discern where the deep shadowed crags and
roseate peaks end, and where the clouds of heaven begin. Surely the
awe-struck voyager may be excused if, at first, he refuses to believe
the geologist, who tells him that these glorious masses are, after all,
the hardened mud of primeval seas, or the cooled slag of subterranean
furnaces--of one substance with the dullest clay, but raised by inward
forces to that place of proud and seemingly inaccessible glory.
But the geologist is right; and due reflection on his teachings, instead
of diminishing our reverence and our wonder, adds all the force of
intellectual sublimity to the mere aesthetic intuition of the
uninstructed beholder.
And after passion and prejudice have died away, the same result will
attend the teachings of the naturalist respecting that great Alps and
Andes of the living world--Man. Our reverence for the nobility of
manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that Man is, in substance
and in structure, one with the brutes; for, he alone possesses the
marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech, whereby, in
the secular period of his existence, he has slowly accumulated and
organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation
of every individual life in other animals; so that now he stands raised
upon it as on a mountain top, far above the level of his humble
fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here
and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth.
'A succinct History of the Controversy respecting the Cerebral Structure
of Man and the Apes'
UP to the year 1857 all anatomists of authority, who had occupied
themselves with the cerebral structure of the Apes--Cuvier, Tiedemann,
Sandifort, Vrolik, Isidore G. St. Hilaire, Schroeder van der Kolk,
Gratiolet--were agreed that the brain of the Apes possesses a POSTERIOR
LOBE.
Tiedemann, in 1825, figured and acknowledged in the text of his 'Icones'
the existence of the POSTERIOR CORNU of the lateral ventricle in the
Apes, not only under the title of 'Scrobiculus parvus loco cornu
posterioris'--a fact which has been paraded--but as 'cornu posterius'
('Icones', p. 54), a circumstance which has been, as sedulously, kept in
the background.
Cuvier ('Lecons', T. iii. p. 103) says, "the anterior or lateral
ventricles possess a digital cavity [posterior cornu] only in Man and
the Apes...its presence depends on that of the posterior lobes."
Schroeder van der Kolk and Vrolik, and Gratiolet, had also figured and
described the posterior cornu in various Apes. As to the HIPPOCAMPUS
MINOR Tiedemann had erroneously asserted its absence in the Apes; but
Schroeder van der Kolk and Vrolik had pointed out the existence of what
they considered a rudimentary one in the Chimpanzee, and Gratiolet had
expressly affirmed its existence in these animals. Such was the state
of our information on these subjects in the year 1856.
In the year 1857, however, Professor Owen, either in ignorance of these
well-known facts or else unjustifiably suppressing them, submitted to
the Linnaean Society a paper "On the Characters, Principles of
Division, and Primary Groups of the Class Mammalia," which was printed
in the Society's Journal, and contains the following passage:--"In Man,
the brain presents an ascensive step in development, higher and more
strongly marked than that by which the preceding sub-class was
distinguished from the one below it. Not only do the cerebral
hemispheres overlap and the olfactory lobes and cerebellum, but they
extend in advance of the one and further back than the other. The
posterior development is so marked, that anatomists have assigned to
that part the character of a third lobe; 'it is peculiar to the genus
Homo, and equally peculiar is the posterior horn of the lateral
ventricle and the 'hippocampus minor,' which characterise the hind lobe
of each hemisphere'."--'Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnaean
Society, Vol. ii. p. 19.
As the essay in which this passage stands had no less ambitious an aim
than the remodelling of the classification of the Mammalia, its author
might be supposed to have written under a sense of peculiar
responsibility, and to have tested, with especial care, the statements
he ventured to promulgate. And even if this be expecting too much,
hastiness, or want of opportunity for due deliberation, cannot now be
pleaded in extenuation of any shortcomings; for the propositions cited
were repeated two years afterwards in the Reade Lecture, delivered
before so grave a body as the University of Cambridge, in 1859.
When the assertions, which I have italicised in the above extract, first
came under my notice, I was not a little astonished at so flat a
contradiction of the doctrines current among well-indormed anatomists;
but, not unnaturally imagining that the deliberate statements of a
responsible person must have some foundation in fact, I deemed it my
duty to investigate the subject anew before the time at which it would
be my business to lecture thereupon came round. The result of my
inquiries was to prove that Mr. Owen's three assertions, that "the
third lobe, the posterior horn of the lateral ventricle, and the
hippocampus minor," are "pecular to the genus 'Homo'," are contrary to
the plainest facts. I communicated this conclusion to the students of
my class; and then, having no desire to embark in a controversy which
could not redound to the honour of British science, whatever its issue,
I turned to more congenial occupations.
The time speedily arrived, however, when a persistence in this reticence
would have involved me in an unworthy paltering with truth.
At the meeting of the British Association at Oxford, in 1860, Professor
Owen repeated these assertions in my presence, and, of course, I
immediately gave them a direct and unqualified contradiction, pledging
myself to justify that unusual procedure elsewhere. I redeemed that
pledge by publishing, in the January number of the 'Natural History
Review' for 1861, an article wherein the truth of the three following
propositions was fully demonstrated (l. c. p. 71):--
"1. That the third lobe is neither peculiar to, nor characteristic of,
man, seeing that it exists in all the higher quadrumana."
"2. That the posterior cornu of the lateral ventricle is neither
peculiar to, nor characteristic of, man, inasmuch as it also exists in
the higher quadrumana."
"3. That the 'hippocampus minor' is neither pecular to, nor
characteristic of, man, as it is found in certain of the higher
quadrumana."
Furthermore, this paper contains the following paragraph (p. 76): "And
lastly, Schroeder van der Kolk and Vrolik (op. cit. p. 271), though
they particularly note that 'the lateral ventricle is distinguished
from that of Man by the very defective proportions of the posterior
cornu, wherein only a stripe is visible as an indication of the
hippocampus minor;' yet the Figure 4, in their second Plate, shows that
this posterior cornu is a perfectly distinct and unmistakeable
structure, quite as large as it often is in Man. It is the more
remarkable that Professor Owen should have overlooked the explicit
statement and figure of these authors, as it is quite obvious, on
comparison of the figures, that his woodcut of the brain of a Chimpanzee
(l. c. p. 19) is a reduced copy of the second figure of Messrs.
Schroeder van der Kolk and Vrolik's first Plate.
"As M. Gratiolet (l. c. p. 18), however is careful to remark,
'unfortunately the brain which they have taken as a model was greatly
altered (profondement affaisse), whence the general form of the brain
is given in these plates in a manner which is altogether incorrect.'
Indeed, it is perfectly obvious, from a comparison of a section of the
skull of the Chimpanzee with these figures, that such is the case; and
it is greatly to be regretted that so inadequate a figure should have
been taken as a typical representation of the Chimpanzee's brain."
From this time forth, the untenability of his position might have been
as apparent to Professor Owen as it was to every one else; but, so far
from retracting the grave errors into which he had fallen, Professor
Owen has persisted in and reiterated them; first, in a lecture
delivered before the Royal Institution on the 19th of March, 1861,
which is admitted to have been accurately reproduced in the 'Athenaeum'
for the 23rd of the same month, in a letter addressed by Professor Owen
to that journal on the 30th of March. The 'Athenaeum report was
accompanied by a diagram purporting to represent a Gorilla's brain, but
in reality so extraordinary a misrepresentation, that Professor Owen
substantially, though not explicitly, withdraws it in the letter in
question. In amending this error, however, Professor Owen fell into
another of much graver import, as his communication concludes with the
following paragraph: "For the true proportion in which the cerebrum
covers the cerebellum in the highest Apes, reference should be made to
the figure of the undissected brain of the Chimpanzee in my 'Reade's
Lecture on the Classification, etc., of the Mammalia', p. 25, fig. 7, 8
vo. 1859."
It would not be credible, if it were not unfortunately true, that this
figure, to which the trusting public is referred, without a word of
qualification, "for the true proportion in which the cerebrum covers
the cerebellum in the highest Apes," is exactly that unacknowledged copy
of Schroeder van der Kolk and Vrolik's figure whose utter inaccuracy
had been pointed out years before by Gratiolet, and had been brought to
Professor Owen's knowledge by myself in the passage of my article in
the 'Natural History Review' above quoted.
I drew public attention to this circumstance again in my reply to
Professor Owen, published in the 'Athenaeum' for April 13th, 1861; but
the exploded figure was reproduced once more by Professor Owen, without
the slightest allusion to its inaccuracy, in the 'Annals of Natural
History' for June 1861!
This proved too much for the patience of the original authors of the
figure, Messrs. Schroeder van der Kolk and Vrolik, who, in a note
addressed to the Academy of Amsterdam, of which they were members,
declared themselves to be, though decided opponents of all forms of the
doctrine of progressive development, above all things, lovers of truth:
and that, therefore, at whatever risk of seeming to lend support to
views which they disliked, they felt it their duty to take the first
opportunity of publicly repudiating Professor Owen's misuse of their
authority.
In this note they frankly admitted the justice of the criticisms of M.
Gratiolet, quoted above, and they illustrated, by new and careful
figures, the posterior lobe, the posterior cornu, and the hippocampus
minor of the Orang. Furthermore, having demonstrated the parts, at one
of the sittings of the Academy, they add, "la presence des parties
contestees y a ete universellement reconnue par les anatomistes
presents a la seance. Le seul doute qui soit reste se rapporte au pes
Hippocampi minor.... A l'etat frais l'indice du petit pied d'Hippocampe
etait plus prononce que maintenant."
Professor Owen repeated his erroneous assertions at the meeting of the
British Association in 1861, and again, without any obvious necessity,
and without adducing a single new fact or new argument, or being able
in any way to meet the crushing evidence from original dissections of
numerous Apes' brains, which had in the meanwhile been brought forward
by Prof. Rolleston,* F.R.S., Mr. Marshall,** F.R.S., Mr. Flower,*** Mr.
Turner,**** and myself,***** revived the subject at the Cambridge
meeting of the same body in 1862. Not content with the tolerably
vigorous repudiation which these unprecedented proceedings met with in
Section D, Professor Owen sanctioned the publication of a version of his
own statements, accompanied by a strange misrepresentation of mine (as
may be seen by comparison of the 'Times' report of the discussion), in
the 'Medical Times' for October 11th, 1862. I subjoin the conclusion
of my reply in the same journal for October 25th.
[Footnotes] * On the Affinities of the Brain of the Orang.
'Nat. Hist. Review', April, 1861.
** On the Brain of a young Chimpanzee. 'Ibid.', July, 1861.
*** On the Posterior lobes of the Cerebrum of the
Quadrumana. 'Philosophical Transactions', 1862.
**** On the anatomical Relations of the Surfaces of the
Tentorium to the Cerebrum and Cerebellum in Man and the
lower Mammals. 'Proceedings of the Royal Society of
Edinburgh', March, 1862.
***** On the Brain of Ateles. 'Proceedings of Zoological
Society', 1861.
"If this were a question of opinion, or a question of interpretation of
parts or of terms,--were it even a question of observation in which the
testimony of my own senses alone was pitted against that of another
person, I should adopt a very different tone in discussing this matter.
I should, in all humility, admit the likelihood of having myself erred
in judgment, failed in knowledge, or been blinded by prejudice.
"But no one pretends now, that the controversy is one of the terms or of
opinions. Novel and devoid of authority as some of Professor Owen's
proposed definitions may have been, they might be accepted without
changing the great features of the case. Hence though special
investigations into these matters have been undertaken during the last
two years by Dr. Allen Thomson, by Dr. Rolleston, by Mr. Marshall, and
by Mr. Flower, all, as you are aware, anatomists of repute in this
country, and by Professors Schroeder Van der Kolk, and Vrolik (whom
Professor Owen incautiously tried to press into his own service) on the
Continent, all these able and conscientious observers have with one
accord testified to the accuracy of my statements, and to the utter
baselessness of the assertions of Professor Owen. Even the venerable
Rudolph Wagner, whom no man will accuse of progressionist proclivities,
has raised his voice on the same side; while not a single anatomist,
great or small, has supported Professor Owen.
"Now, I do not mean to suggest that scientific differences should be
settled by universal suffrage, but I do conceive that solid proofs must
be met by something more than empty and unsupported assertions. Yet
during the two years through which this preposterous controversy has
dragged its weary length, Professor Owen has not ventured to bring
forward a single preparation in support of his often-repeated
assertions.
"The case stands thus, therefore:--Not only are the statements made by
me in consonance with the doctrines of the best older authorities, and
with those of all recent investigators, but I am quite ready to
demonstrate them on the first monkey that comes to hand; while
Professor Owen's assertions are not only in diametrical opposition to
both old and new authorities, but he has not produced, and, I will add,
cannot produce, a single preparation which justifies them"
I now leave this subject, for the present.--For the credit of my calling
I should be glad to be, hereafter, for ever silent upon it. But,
unfortunately, this is a matter upon which, after all that has
occurred, no mistake or confusion of terms is possible--and in affirming
that the posterior lobe, the posterior cornu, and the hippocampus minor
exist in certain Apes, I am stating either that which is true, or that
which I must know to be false. The question has thus become one of
personal veracity. For myself, I will accept no other issue than this,
grave as it is, to the present controversy.