DARWIN AND HAUGHTON.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 180, 8 September 1876, Page 13

DARWIN AND HAUGHTON.

We chronicled two days ago a joyful discovery said to have been made by the Darwinians in the clay of Prince Edward's Island ; nothing less than the remains of a fossil man with a palpable tail. Lest those who are ignorantly eloquent on the doctrine of evolution, and talk wisely of the origin of species, should be unduly elate over their new " find," it is well that we should notice something which has been said on the other side of the question. In Dublin the other night Dr. Haughton, the secretary to the local Zoological Gardens, roundly declared that the soi-disant philosophy of the Darwinians was false, and their enlightened inquiry but another name for arrogant scepticism. More than that, the learned professor undertook to prove it by the logic of fact, appealing to his knowledge of natural history in corroboration of his view. He stated that all the inscriptions on the Egyptian and Assyrian monuments showed that the goose that Rameses ate for his dinner was identical with the goose of the present day. They had mummies of cats which were 5,000 years old, and anatomists had found that during all these years they had not varied in a single respect. Geology was opposed to Mr. Darwin, too ; for monkeys found in the fossil strata were as perfect monkeys as those now roamino- in the forests of Africa, and human skulls that had hitherto been found quite did away with the theory that there were intermediate classes between man and the ape. Animals in the same species would differ from each other, but it could be proved that all were derived from one stock; dogs were various in shape, but their ancestry could be traced to the wolf. There were no dogs in Australia, but a short time after it had been colonised a lot of do«-s were brought there which ran wild, and they are now dingoes, resembling wolves. The dingo not merely looks like the wolf, but his moral nature is like the wolf's The different races of men on the surface of the globe differ from each other much less than the races of dogs. Therefore, if it can be shown that dogs are derived from a common ancestor, there can be no difficulty in pro vino- that man came from a common stock. The pigeon, on which Mr* Darwin relied, is another example, but Mr. Darwin was never able to

produce anything from it but a pigeon. A rook pigeon can be made into a tumbler or a fantail ; but let them go wild, and they will become rook pigeons again. By a party of reasoning, the child of a civilised mm let loose in the wilderness ought to revert in the course of a few generations to a man with a tail, if that were his original condition; but, unfortunately for Mr. Darwin, though wild men are sometimes found, men even with a rudiment of a tail have never yet been discovered. — ' Standard.'