s the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor."

These few lines of Darwin's have a greater scientific value than
hundreds of those so-called "anthropological treatises," which give
detailed descriptions of single organs, or mathematical tables with
series of numbers and what are claimed to be "exact analyses," but are
devoid of synoptic conclusions and a philosophical spirit.

Charles Darwin is not generally recognised as a great anthropologist,
nor does the school of modern anthropologists regard him as a leading
authority. In Germany, especially, the great majority of the members of
the anthropological societies took up an attitude of hostility to him
from the very beginning of the controversy in 1860. "The Descent of Man"
was not merely rejected, but even the discussion of it was forbidden on
the ground that it was "unscientific."

The centre of this inveterate hostility for thirty years--especially
after 1877--was Rudolph Virchow of Berlin, the leading investigator in
pathological anatomy, who did so much for the reform of medicine by
his establishment of cellular pathology in 1858. As a prominent
representative of "exact" or "descriptive" anthropology, and lacking a
broad equipment in comparative anatomy and ontogeny, he was unable to
accept the theory of descent. In earlier years, and especially during
his splendid period of activity at Wurzburg (1848-1856), he had been a
consistent free-thinker, and had in a number of able articles (collected
in his "Gesammelte Abhandlungen") ("Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur
wissenschaftlichen Medizin", Berlin, 1856.) upheld the unity of human
nature, the inseparability of body and spirit. In later years at Berlin,
where he was more occupied with political work and sociology (especially
after 1866), he abandoned the positive monistic position for one of
agnosticism and scepticism, and made concessions to the dualistic dogma
of a spiritual world apart from the material frame.

In the course of a Scientific Congress at Munich in 1877 the conflict
of these antithetic views of nature came into sharp relief. At this
memorable Congress I had undertaken to deliver the first address
(September 18th) on the subject of "Modern evolution in relation to the
whole of science." I maintained that Darwin's theory not only solved
the great problem of the origin of species, but that its implications,
especially in regard to the nature of man, threw considerable light on
the whole