DARWIN'S DESCENT OF MAN.

Westport Times, Volume V, Issue 818, 30 May 1871, Page 2

DARWIN'S DESCENT OF MAN.

"Descended from the Conqueror" sounds well in many ears; it is more than eight hundred years ago. But what are G-arter King-at-Arms or Sir Bernard Burke as pedigree hunters compared with Mr Darwin t The author of " Descent of Man " take 3 us through hundreds and hundreds of ages, till we can no longer give any account of time, and introduces us to our ancestry—a group of marine animals. He says : " By considering the embroyological structure of man—the homologies which he presents with the lower animals the rudiments which he retains—and the reversions to which he is liable, we can partly recall in imagination the former condition of our early progenitors, and can approximately place them in their proper position in the zoological series. We learn that man is descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old "World. This creature, if its whole structure had been examined by a naturalist, would have been classed amongst the Quadrumana, as surely as would the common and still more ancient progenitor of the Old and New World monkeys. The Quadrumana and all higher mammals are probably derived from an ancient marsupial animal, and this through a long line of diversified forms either from sone reptile like or some amphibian-like creature and this again from some fish-like animal. In the dim obscurity of the past, we can see that the early progenitor of all the Vertebrata must have been an aquatic animal, provided with branchue, with the two sexes united in the same individual, and with the most important organs of of the body (such as the brain and heart) imperfectly developed. This animal seems to have been more like the larvae of our existing marine Ascidians than any other known form. In regard to bodily size and strength, we do not know whether man is descended from some comparatively small I species, like the chimpanzee, or from one as powerful as the gorilla; and therefore we cannot say whether man has J become larger and stronger or smaller J and weaker, in comparison with his ! progenitors." At the end of his work Mr Darwin says : —" The main 'con. elusion arrived at in this work, namely, that man is descended from some lowly organized form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons. For my own part, I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey who braved its dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph bis young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs—as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitious."

A Disintegrated Life.—According to a statistician, taken the mean of many accounts, a man fifty years of age has slept 6000 days; worked 6500 days; walked 800 days; amused himself 4000 days ; was eating 1500 days ; was sick 500 days, Ac. He m 9000 pounds of bread; 34,000 pounds of meat; 4000 pounds of vegetables, eggs and fish, and drank 7000 gallons. This would make a respectable lake of SOO feet surface and three feet deep.