Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work

by Sir P. Chalmers Mitchell

It is true, he went on to explain his belief in the existence of certain characters in the brain which seemed to him to justify the separation of man in a different group from that in which the apes were placed; but it is certain that he regretted having said anything which seemed to support the Darwinian view; and, two years later, when the opposition to Darwin was in its acutest stage, Owen withdrew his words. His "Reade Lecture," delivered in the University of Cambridge, was in all respects a reprint of the essay from which we have just quoted, but the apparently dangerous words were omitted. More than that, the points insisted on in the essay as being sufficient for the purpose of separating man in zoölogical classification were elevated into a reason against descent. Although Huxley, in several addresses and publications, disproved the existence of the alleged differences, and although Sir William Flower gave an actual demonstration shewing the essential identity of the brain of man and of the apes in the matter in question, Owen never admitted his error.

CHARLES DARWIN
From the painting by Hon. John Collier in the National Portrait Gallery

It is not surprising that, if an anatomist so distinguished and acute as was Owen allowed his judgment to be completely overborne by the storm of prejudice against Darwinism, those who were not anatomists should have held up to ridicule all idea of comparison between man and the apes. In The Origin of Species itself, no elaborate attempt had been made to set forth the anatomical arguments in favour of or against a community of descent for man and the apes. But it was made sufficiently plain, and the public laid hold of the point eagerly, that the doctrine of descent was not meant to exclude man from the field of its operation. Huxley, in the course of his ordinary work as Professor of Biology, had, among many other subjects, naturally turned his attention to the anatomy and classification of the higher animals. When Owen's essay appeared, he found that he was unable to agree with many of the conclusions contained in it, and had set about a renewed investigation of the matter. Thus it happened that, when the question became prominent, in 1860, Huxley was ready with material contributions to it. He believed, moreover, that, as Darwin was not specially acquainted with the anatomy and development of vertebrates, there was an opportunity for doing a real service to the cause of evolution. Accordingly, in 1860, he took for the subject of a series of lectures to workingmen the "Relation of Man to the Lower Animals," and, in 1862, expanded the lectures into a volume called Man's Place in Nature. When it was ready, he was prepared to say with a good conscience that his conclusions "had not been formed hastily or enunciated crudely."

"I thought," he wrote in the preface to the 1894 edition, "I had earned the right to publish them, and even fancied I might be thanked, rather than reproved, for so doing. However, in my anxiety to promulgate nothing erroneous, I asked a highly competent anatomist and very good friend of mine to look through my proofs, and, if he could, point out any errors of fact. I was well pleased when he returned them without any criticism on that score; but my satisfaction was speedily dashed by the very earnest warning, as to the consequences of publication, which my friend's interest in my welfare led him to give; but, as I have confessed elsewhere, when I was a young man there was just a little—a mere soupçon—in my composition of that tenacity of purpose which has another name, and I felt sure that all the evil things prophesied would not be so painful to me as the giving up of that which I had resolved to do, upon grounds which I conceived to be right. So the book came out, and I must do my friend the justice to say that his forecast was completely justified. The Boreas of criticism blew his hardest blasts of misrepresentation and ridicule for some years; and I was even as one of the wicked. Indeed, it surprises me, at times, to think how anyone who had sunk so low could have emerged into, at any rate, relative respectability."

Further, in the same preface, Huxley strongly advises others to imitate his action in this matter. There are now, and no doubt there always will be, truths "plainly obvious and generally denied." Whoever attacks the current ideas is certain, unless human nature changes greatly, to encounter a bitter opposition, and there will always be those among his friends who recommend him to temper truth by prudence. Huxley's advice is different:

"If there is a young man of the present generation who has taken as much trouble as I did to assure himself that they are truths, let him come out with them, without troubling his head about the barking of the dogs of St. Ernulphus. Veritas prævalebit—some day; and, even if she does not prevail in his time, he himself will be all the better and wiser for having tried to help her. And let him recollect that such great reward is full payment for all his labour and pains."

Although they were written so long ago, the lectures on "Man's Place in Nature" are still the best existing treatise on the subject, and we shall give an outline of them, mentioning the chief points in which further work has been done. Information concerning the man-like apes was scattered in very different places, in the grave records of scientific societies, in the letters of travellers and missionaries, in the reports of the zoölogical societies which had been in possession of living specimens. The facts had to be sifted out from a great mass of verbiage and unfounded statement. With a characteristic desire for historical accuracy, more usual in a man of letters than in an anatomist, Huxley began with a study of classical and mediæval legends of the existence of pigmies and man-like creatures; but, while recognising that legends of satyrs and fauns were presages of the discovery of man-like apes, he was unable to find any actual record earlier than that contained in Pigafetta's Description of the Kingdom of Congo, drawn up from the notes of a Portuguese sailor and published in 1598. The descriptions and figures in this work apparently referred to chimpanzees. From this date onwards he traces the literature of the animals in question, and then proceeds to give an account of them.

There are four distinct kinds of man-like apes: in Eastern Asia the Orangs and the Gibbons (although some later writers differ from Huxley in removing the Gibbons from the group of anthropoids); in Western Africa, the Chimpanzees and the Gorillas. All these have certain characters in common. They are inhabitants of the old world; they all have the same number of teeth as man, possessing four incisors, two canines, four premolars, and six true molars in each jaw, in the adult condition, while the milk dentition, as in man, consists of twenty teeth,—four incisors, two canines, and four molars in each jaw. Since Huxley wrote, a large bulk of additional work upon teeth has been published, and we now know that man and the anthropoid apes display the same kind of degenerative specialisation in their jaws. Simpler and older forms of mammals had a much larger number of teeth, and these differed among themselves more than the teeth of the higher forms. In the Anthropoids and Man, the jaws are proportionately shorter and less heavy than in simpler forms, and, in correspondence with this, the number of the teeth has become reduced, while the teeth themselves tend to form a more even row. The canine or eye-teeth are relatively smaller in the gorilla than in primitive mammals; they are still smaller in the lower races of man; while in ordinary civilised man they do not project above the others. The shortening of the jaw is still proceeding, and, although in lower races of man the last molar or wisdom tooth is almost as large as the molars in front of it, in the higher races the wisdom tooth is much smaller and frequently does not develop at all, or begins to decay very soon after its appearance. If the process of extinction of lower races were to proceed much further, so that civilised white races became the only human inhabitants of the earth, then the gap between the Anthropoids and Man would be wider than it now is; man would be characterised by the presence of one tooth less than the anthropoids, just as the anthropoids and some lower monkeys are characterised by having one tooth less than monkeys still lower.