question that the systems of those Rabbis and Fathers,1 and their modern imitators, who make Adam a being of stupendous knowledge and superhuman wisdom, are more improbable, as well as more unscriptural, than those of writers who, like Theophilus of Antioch among the Fathers, and Joseph Ben Gorion among the Jews, make his original condition a weak and inferior one. Philosophy, the arts, the sciences, the observations of the simplest natural facts, the elucidation of the simplest natural laws, required centuries to elaborate. We do not even hear of the first kingdom till some thousands of years after the first man. It is but as yesterday that man has wrung from the patient silence of Nature some of her most important, and apparently her most open

secrets.

It is forsooth a degradation to suppose that man originated in an ignorant and barbarous condition! People prefer the poet's fancies:

:

One man alone, the father of mankind,

Drew not his life from woman; never gazed
With mute unconsciousness of what he saw
On all around him; learned not by degrees:
Nor owed articulation to his ear;
But, moulded by his Maker into man,
At once upstood intelligent, surveyed
All creatures; with precision understood
Their purport, uses, properties; assigned

To each his place significant; and filled
With love and wisdom, rendered back to Heaven
In praise harmonious the first air he drew.

1 Clem. Alex. Strom. iv. 25, § 173; 23, § 152. Buddæus, Philos. Hebr. 383-388, where he gives the Rabbinic fancies about Adam Kadmon. Suidas s. v. 'Adáμ. South, State of Man before the Fall, &c. On the other side see Clem. Alex. Strom. vi. 12, § 96; Greg. Naz. Orat. xxxviii. and even Irenæus, Adv. Hæres. iv. 38.

12;

He was excused the penalties of dull
Minority. . . . History, not wanted yet,

Leaned on her elbow, watching Time, whose course
Eventful should supply her with a theme. 1

Fascinating and poetical, no doubt; the primal man, regarded as a being beautiful of body, gracious in soul,2 filled in heart with virgin purity and sweetness, and discovering everything with exquisite and lightninglike spontaneity! Nevertheless, Science 3 banishes amongst myths and chimeras the fancy of a primitive man, burning with youth and beauty, to show us upon icy shores I know not what abject being, more hideous than the Australian, more savage than the Patagonian, a fierce animal struggling against the animals with which he disputes his miserable existence.' What support is there for the poetic hypotheses of those who love their own assumptions better than they love the truths which science reveals? In a handful of rude and bizarre traditions, in a few skulls of the very meanest and most degraded type, in here and there a gnawed fragment of human bones, in a few coarse and pitiable implements of bone and flint, what traces have we of that radiant and ideal protoplast whom men have

Cowper, The Task.

4

2 The Bible tells us nothing of this kind; but it would take us too long here to examine fully the Biblical data. I believe that when fairly and thorougly considered, they sanction the view here expressed. For a picture of frightfully degraded aboriginal races, see Job xxx. 1–8; Ewald, Gesch. d. Volkes Israel, i. 27; De Gobineau, i. 486.

Aug. Laugel, Rev. des Deux Mondes, May 1, 1863; cf. De Gobineau, De l'Inégalité des Races, i. 228; Link, Die Urwelt, i. 84; Lyell, Princ. of Geol. i. 178; Laugel, Science et Philosophie, p. 270.

4 It has even been suspected (most likely on insufficient grounds), from the position of the foramen magnum, that the head was not vertical on the neck. See Ethnol. Trans. p. 269, 1863.

delighted to invest with purely imaginary attributes, and to contemplate as the common ancestor of their race? But man, in his futile and baseless arrogance, must exalt the earliest representatives of his kind, though he cannot deny the infinite debasement of his cotemporary brethren. He refuses to see in his far-off ancestors what he must see in his living congeners, a miserable' population maintaining an inglorious struggle with the powers of nature, wrestling with naked bodies against the forest animals, and forced to dispute their cave-dwellings with the hyæna and the wolf.

Years pass before the infant can realise and express his own individuality; ages may have rolled away before those ancestors of man who lived in the dim and misty dawn of human 2 existence could in any way understand their own position in the yet untamed chaos of the ancient world. The recognition of the long and feeble periods of animalism and ignorance is no more degrading to humanity than the remembrance of the time when he was rocked and swaddled and dandled in a nurse's arms is a degradation to any individual man. Disbelieving, on the scientific ground of the Fixity of Type,3 the Darwinian hypothesis, we should yet consider

1 It is agreed on all hands that Gen. i. 26, has no bearing on this question, since it refers to the moral and intellectual nature of manreason, liberty, immortality. 'Non secundum formam corporis factus est ad imaginem Dei, sed secundum rationalem mentem.'-Aug. de Trin. xii. 7. Obviously if all men--even Mundrucus and Ostiaks-are created in the image of God,' then the first men were so, however low their grade.

2 It is a remarkable fact that native legends betray a reminiscence of the Elk, Mastodon, Megalonyx, Deinotherium, &c. Hamilton Smith, Nat. Hist. of Human Spec. pp. 104-106; Maury, Des Ossemens humains (Mém. de la Soc. des Antiq. i. 287), &c.

3 I may perhaps be allowed to refer to my paper on this subject read

E

it disgraceful and humiliating to try to shake it by an ad captandum argument, or a claptrap platform appeal to the unfathomable ignorance and unlimited arrogance of a prejudiced assembly. We should blush to meet it with an anathema or a sneer; and in doing so we should be very far from the ludicrous and complacent assumption that we were on the side of the angels !' Is it not indisputable that man's body- all but an inappreciable fragment of its substance'is composed of the very same materials, the same protein and fats, and salines, and water, which constitute the inorganic world,—which may unquestionably have served long ago as the dead material which was vivified and utilised in the bodies of extinct creatures,—and which may serve in endless metensomatosis 1 for we know not what organisms yet to come? Was there, or was there not, a time in the o embryonic dawn of individual life, when every one of us drew the breath of life by means not of lungs but of a species of gills? Is this fact any disgrace to us, or will any pseudo-theologian have the dogmatic hardihood to deny it? Are we, in our gross and haughty ignorance, to assume that, because by God's grace we carry in ourselves the destinies of so grand a future, a deep and impassable gulf of separation must therefore divide even the material particles of our frame from those of all other creatures which find their develop. ment in so poor a life? What sanction have we for this assumption? Is it to be found in the future fate of

1

before the British Association this year, and now in the Ethnolog. Soc.'s Transactions.

If the word, which has the authority of Clemens Alexandrinus, and which is now imperiously demanded by the wants of science, may be pardoned on the score of its necessity.

the elements of our body-destined, as we know they are, to be swept along by the magic1eddy of nature, to be transmuted by her potent alchemy into nameless transformations, and subjected by her pitiless economy to what we should blindly consider as nameless dishonour? or, looking backwards as well as forwards, is it to be found in the fact that there are stages in the earlier development of the human embryo, during which the most powerful microscope, and the most delicate analysis, can neither detect nor demonstrate the slightest difference between the 2 three living germs of which one is destined to be a wolf, the second a horse, and the third a man? If the question is to be degraded from scientific decision into a matter for teatable æsthetics and ignorant prepossessions, is this certain embryonic degradation or immaturity less oppressive than the admission of a bare possibility that, myriads of centuries ago, there may have been a near genetic connection between the highest of the animals and the lowest of the human race? It is not yet proved that there was; we believe that there was not; but, nevertheless, the hypothesis is neither irreverent nor absurd. Let those who love truth only consider what are the certain facts about our mortal bodies, and be still;-awaiting the gradual revelation of His own past workings which the All-wise Creator may yet vouchsafe, not assuredly to the clamorous, the idle, and the ignorantly denunciative, but to humble and studious enquirers, to those loftier and less self-complacent souls, whom He has endowed with the desire, the wisdom, and the ability to search out the pathless mystery of

1 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection; Huxley, Lect. pp. 15–19; Hamlet, v. 1. 2 Karl Snell, Die Schöpfung des Menschen, p. 130.