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.
[1] Novum Organon, li.
[2] Partis instaurationis secundæ 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.