[334] See above, pp. 300, 301.
[335] Whitney.
[336] Sayce.
[337] Farrar.
[338] Garnett.
[339] Sayce.
[340] Max Müller.
[341] See especially Science of Thought, chaps, ii. and iv. The following quotations may suffice to justify this statement. “If once a genus has been rightly recognized as such, it seems to me self-contradictory to admit that it could ever give rise to another genus.... Once a sheep always a sheep, once an ape always an ape, once a man always a man.... What seems to me simply irrational is to look for a fossil ape as the father of a fossil man.... Why should it be the settled or ready-made Pithecanthropus who became the father of the first man, though everywhere else in nature what has once become settled remains settled, or, if it varies, it varies within definite limits only? (pp. 212-215).... If the germ of a man never develops into an ape, nor the germ of an ape into a man, why should the full-grown ape have developed into a man? (p. 117).... Let us now see what Darwin himself has to say in support of his opinion that man does not date from the same period which marks the beginning of organic life on earth—that he has not an ancestor of his own, like the other great families of living beings, but that he had to wait till the mammals had reached a high degree of development, and that he then stepped into the world as the young or as the child of an ape” (p. 160), &c., &c. So far as can be gathered from these, and other statements to the same effect, it does not appear that Professor Max Müller can ever have quite understood the theory of evolution, even in its application to plants and animals. For these are not criticisms upon that theory: they are failures to appreciate in what it is that the theory itself consists.
[342] Ursprung der Sprache, s. 84.
[343] Ursprung der Sprache, s. 119.