rwinism than the
theory he formerly maintained, but has since abandoned, viz. that the men
of the Old World were descended from African and Asiatic apes, while,
similarly, the American apes were the progenitors of the human beings of
the New World. The cause of this palpable error in a too eager disciple{13}
one might hope was not anxiety to snatch up all or any arms available
against Christianity, were it not for the tone unhappily adopted by this
author. But it is unfortunately quite impossible to mistake his meaning and
intention, for he is a writer whose offensiveness is gross, while it is
sometimes almost surpassed by an amazing shallowness. Of course, as might
fully be expected, he adopts and reproduces the absurdly trivial objections
to absolute morality drawn from differences in national customs.[7] And he
seems to have as little conception of the distinction between "formally"
moral actions and those which are only "materially" moral, as of that
between the _verbum mentale_ and the _verbum oris_. As an example of his
onesidedness, it may be remarked that he compares the skulls of the
American monkeys (_Cebus apella_ and _C. albifrons_) with the intention of
showing that man is of several distinct species, because skulls of
different men are less alike than are those of these two monkeys; and he
does this regardless of how the skulls of domestic animals (with which it
is far more legitimate to compare races of men than with wild kinds),
_e.g._ of different dogs or pigeons, tell precisely in the opposite
direction. Regardless also of the fact that perhaps no genus of monkeys is
in a more unsatisfactory state as to the determination of its different
kinds than the genus chosen by him for illustration. This is so much the
case that J. A. Wagner (in his supplement to Schreber's great work on
Beasts) at first included all the kinds in a single species.

As to the strength of his prejudice and his regretable coarseness, one
quotation will be enough to display both. Speaking of certain early
Christian missionaries, he says,[8] "It is not so very improbable that the
new religion, before which the flourishing Roman civilization relapsed into
a state of barbarism, should have been introduced by people in whose {14}
skulls the anatomist finds simious characters so well developed, and in
which the phrenologist finds the organ of veneration so much enlarged. I
shall, in the meanwhile, call these simious narrow skulls of Swit