eflection rushed upon his mind that such men had been
his ancestors. These men were absolutely naked and bedaubed with paint,
their long hair was tangled, their mouths frothed with excitement, and
their expression was wild, startled, and distrustful. They possessed
hardly any arts, and, like wild animals, lived on what they could catch;
they had no government, and were merciless to every one not of their own
small tribe. Remembering the impression made on him by the Fuegians,
Darwin suggests that he who has seen a savage in his native land will
not feel much shame if forced to acknowledge that the blood of some more
humble creature flows in his veins. "For my own part," he says, "I would
as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey who braved his
dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper,--or from that old
baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his
young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs,--as from a savage who
delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises
infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no
decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions." Darwin holds, in
fine, that man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen,
though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic
scale; it is further submitted that the fact of his having thus risen,
instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for
a still higher destiny in the distant future.

As a scientist, however, Darwin is not concerned with hopes or fears,
but simply with the truth, as man's reason enables him to discern it. We
must recognize, he thinks, as the truth, established by an overwhelming
array of inductive evidence, that man, with all his noble qualities,
with sympathy which he feels for the most debased, with benevolence
which extends not only to other men, but to the humblest living
creature, with his godlike intellect, which has penetrated into the
movements and constitution of the solar system--with all these exalted
powers--man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his
lowly origin.

VI.

We have said that Darwin's theory of the origin of species, together
with its corollary, the descent of man, has met with almost universal
acceptance by scientists. We have to use the qualifying adverb, because
some of Darwin's contemporaries, including Virchow and Owen, not to
mention