“He who surpasses or subdues mankind,
Must look down on the hate of those below,”
says the great English poet. The latter is echoed in prose by the king of French poets. Writes Victor Hugo:
“You have your enemies; but who has not? Guizot has enemies, Thiers has enemies, Lamartine has enemies. Have I not been myself fighting for twenty years? Have I not been for twenty years past reviled, betrayed, sold, rended, hooted, taunted, insulted, calumniated? Have not my books been parodied[parodied], and my deeds travestied? I also am beset and spied upon, I also have traps laid for me, and I have even been made to fall into them. But what is all that to me? I disdain it. It is one of the most difficult yet necessary things in life to learn to disdain. Disdain protects and crushes. It is a breast plate and a club. You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed, created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything which shines. Do not trouble yourself about it. Do not give your enemies the satisfaction of thinking that they cause you any feeling, be disdainful.” (Choses Vues.)
“THE LATEST ROMANCE OF SCIENCE,” Summarized by a Frenchman.
If the Atomo-mechanical Theory of the Universe has caused considerable embarrassment to our materialists, and brought some of their much beloved scientific speculations to grief (see “Concepts of Modern Physics,” by Stallo), the layman must not be ungrateful to the great men for other boons received at their hands. Through the indefatigable labours of the most famous biologists and anthropologists of the day, the mystery which has hitherto enshrouded the origin of man is no more. It has vanished into thin air; thanks to the activity of the officina (workshop, in Queen’s English), in Haeckel’s brain, or, as a Hylo-Idealist would say, in the vesiculo neurine of his hemispherical ganglia[[15]]—the origin of mankind has to be sought in that scientific region, and nowhere else.
Religiously read by the “Animalists” in its English translation in Protestant and Monarchical England, the “Pedigree of Man” is now welcomed with shouts of joy in Roman Catholic Republican France. A summary has just been compiled of it by a French savant, who rejoices in the name of Topinard. The summary on that “question of questions” (as Mr. Huxley calls it), is more interesting in reality than the “Pedigree of Man” itself. It is so deliciously fantastic and original, that one comes almost to regret that our numerous and frolicsome ancestors in the Zoological Gardens of Europe and America seem to show no intention of getting up a subscription list among themselves, for the raising of a lasting monument to the great Haeckel. Thus, ingratitude in man must surely be a phenomenon of atavism; another suggestive point being thus gained toward further proof of man’s descent from the ingrate and heartless, as well as tailless, pithecoid baboon.
Saith the learned Topinard:—
“At the commencement of what geologists call the Laurentian period of the Earth, and the fortuitous union of certain elements of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, under conditions which probably only took place at that epoch, the first albuminoid clots were formed. From them, and by spontaneous generation,[[16]] the first cellules or cleavage masses took their origin. These cellules were then sub-divided and multiplied, arranging themselves in the form of organs, and after a series of transformations, fixed by Mr. Haeckel at nine in number, originated certain vertebrata of the genus Amphioxus lanceolatus. The division into sexes was marked out, the spinal marrow and chorda dorsalis became visible. At the tenth stage the brain and skull made their appearance, as in the lamprey; at the eleventh, the limbs and jaws were developed ... the earth was then only in the Silurian period. At the sixteenth, the adaptation to terrestrial life ceased. At the seventeenth, which corresponds to the Jurassic phase of the history of the globe, the genealogy of man is raised to the kangaroo among the marsupials. At the eighteenth, he becomes a lemurian; the Tertiary period commences. At the nineteenth, he becomes Catarrhinian, that is to say, an ape with a tail, a Pithecian. At the twentieth he becomes an anthropoid, continuing so throughout the whole of the Miocene period. At the twenty-first he becomes a man-ape, he does not possess language, nor in consequence the corresponding brain. Lastly, at the twenty-second, man comes forth ... in his inferior types.”