ment and observation on
the domain of hypothetical dogma; and that the most difficult, as
well as the most important, object of every honest worker is "_sich
ent-subjectiviren_"--to get rid of his preconceived notions, and to
keep his hypotheses well in hand, as the good servants and bad masters
that they are.

I do not think I have omitted any one of Professor Virchow's main
theses in this brief enumeration. I do not find that they are disputed
by Haeckel, and I should be profoundly astonished if they were. What,
then, is all the coil about, if we leave aside various irritating
sarcasms, which need not concern peaceable Englishmen? Certainly about
nothing that touches the present main issues of scientific thought.
The "plastidule-soul" and the potentialities of carbon may be sound
scientific conceptions, or they may be the reverse, but they are no
necessary part of the doctrine of evolution, and I leave their defence
to Professor Haeckel.

On the question of equivocal generation, I have been compelled, more
conspicuously and frequently than I could wish, during the last ten
years, to enunciate exactly the same views as those put forward by
Professor Virchow; so that, to my mind, at any rate, the denial that
any such process has as yet been proved to take place in the existing
state of nature, as little affects the general doctrine.[3]

With respect to another side issue, raised by Professor Virchow, he
appears to me to be entirely in the wrong. He is careful to say that
he has no unwillingness to accept the descent of man from some lower
form of vertebrate life; but, reminding us of the special attention
which, of late years, he has given to anthropology, he affirms that
such evidence as exists is not only insufficient to support that
hypothesis, but is contrary to it. "Every positive progress which we
have made in the region of prehistoric anthropology has removed us
further from the demonstration of this relation."

Well, I also have studied anthropological questions in my time; and I
feel bound to remark, that this assertion of Professor Virchow's
appears to me to be a typical example of the kind of incautious
over-statement which he so justly reprehends.

For, unless I greatly err, all the real knowledge which we possess of
the fossil remains of man goes no farther back than the Quaternary
epoch; and the most that can be asserted on Professor Virchow's side
respecting these remains is, that none of them prese