ON
THE PSEUDOLOGICAL FUNCTIONS
OF
CARYLL’S GANGLIA
A PAMPHLET
WHICH the reader need not read. It is quite as easy to understand the book without it.
Extract from a lecture delivered, for a grossly insufficient fee, by a professor of great popular reputation at the Royal Institution on January 26th, 1915:—
“The Review of Comparative Biology in its October issue contained a short and modest paper over the name of Henry Upton which is destined to influence modern thought more profoundly than anything that has appeared since Lux Mundi or the Origin of Species. Henry Upton has been taken from us. Or, to use a phrase consecrated by his own reverent quotation of it, he has ‘Passed beyond the Veil,’ he has crossed the bar; but short as the time is since this brief essay was given to the world, his name is already famous.
“You will have heard the echoes of passionate discussions upon his famous theory; it is my business this afternoon to put before you in clear and popular language that you can easily understand, what that theory was; and when I have done so I make no doubt that you will see why it has been thought so transcendently important.
“Briefly, Henry Upton declared himself finally convinced that between Man and the Simius Gabiensis there existed a differentiation so marked as to destroy all possibility of any recent common origin for the two species.
“When I add that Simius Gabiensis is but the technical name for the Ringtailed Baboon of our childhood you will at once appreciate what a revolution such a pronouncement must work if it can be sustained: and it has been sustained!
“It is common knowledge and will be familiar to the youngest child in this room that the Ringtailed Baboon is the highest of the Anthropoids, and the one nearest approaching the majesty of the Human Species—Homo Sapiens; and if between him and ourselves the link of affinity prove far removed, it seems indeed as though the whole edifice of modern biology and of modern thought itself will fall to the ground.