w is a politician--maybe a German Burke, for anything
that I know to the contrary; at any rate, he knows the political value
of words; and, as a man of science, he is devoid of the excuses that
might be made for Burke. Nevertheless, he gravely charges his hearers
to "imagine what shape the theory of descent takes in the head of a
Socialist."

I have tried to comply with this request, but I have utterly failed to
call up the dread image; I suppose because I do not sufficiently
sympathise with Socialists. All the greater is my regret that
Professor Virchow did not himself unfold the links of the hidden bonds
which unite evolution with revolution, and bind together the community
of descent with the community of goods.

Professor Virchow is, I doubt not, an accomplished English scholar.
Let me commend the "Rejected Addresses" to his attention. For since
the brothers Smith sang--

"Who makes the quartern loaf and Luddites rise,"--
Who fills the butchers' shops with large blue flies,

there has been nothing in literature at all comparable to the attempt
to frighten sober people by the suggestion that evolutionary
speculations generate revolutionary schemes in Socialist brains. But
then the authors of the "Rejected Addresses" were joking, while
Professor Virchow is in grim earnest; and that makes a great
difference in the moral aspect of the two achievements.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Novum Organon, li.

[2] Partis instaurationis secundae delineatio.

[3] I may remark parenthetically that Professor Virchow's statement of
the attitude of Harvey towards equivocal generation is strangely
misleading. For Harvey, as every student of his works knows, believed in
equivocal generation; and, in the sense in which he uses the word ovum,
"nempe substantiam quandam corpoream vitam habentem potentia," the truth
of the axiom "omne vivum ex ovo," popularly ascribed to him, has in no
wise been affected by the discoveries of later days in the manner
asserted by Professor Virchow.

[4] I do not admit that so much can be said; for the like of the
Neanderthal skull has yet to be produced from among the crania of
existing men.

[5] Man's Place in Nature, p. 159.

PREFACE.

When the address delivered by Rudolph Virchow on the 22d of September
last year, at the fiftieth meeting of German Naturalists and
Physicians at Munich, on "Freedom of Science in the Modern State,"
appeared in print in the following October, I was called up