enforcing that affirmative, so long, to our minds, the new doctrine must be content to remain among the former—­an extremely valuable, and in the highest degree probable, doctrine; indeed the only extant hypothesis which is worth anything in a scientific point of view; but still a hypothesis, and not a theory of species.”  “After much consideration,” he adds, “and assuredly with no bias against Darwin’s views, it is our clear conviction that, as the evidence now stands, it is not absolutely proven that a group of animals, having all the characters exhibited by species in nature, has ever been originated by selection, whether artificial or natural.”

But Darwin is absurd as well as groundless.  He announces two laws, which, in his judgment, explain the development of man from the lowest form of animal life, viz., natural selection and sexual selection.  The latter has been abandoned by the modern believers in evolution, but two illustrations, taken from Darwin’s “Descent of Man,” will show his unreliability as a guide to the young.  On page 587 of the 1874 edition, he tries to explain man’s superior mental strength (a proposition more difficult to defend to-day than in Darwin’s time).  His theory is that, “the struggle between the males for the possession of the females” helped to develop the male mind and that this superior strength was transmitted by males to their male offspring.

After having shown, to his own satisfaction, how sexual selection would account for the (supposed) greater strength of the male mind, he turns his attention to another question, namely, how did man become a hairless animal?  This he accounts for also by sexual selection—­the females preferred the males with the least hair (page 624).  In a footnote on page 625 he says that this view has been harshly criticized.  “Hardly any view advanced in this work,” he says, “has met with so much disfavour.”  A comment and a question:  First, Unless the brute females were very different from the females as we know them, they would not have agreed in taste.  Some would “probably” have preferred males with less hair, others, “we may well suppose,” would have preferred males with more hair.  Those with more hair would naturally be the stronger because better able to resist the weather.  But, second, how could the males have strengthened their minds by fighting for the females if, at the same time, the females were breeding the hair off by selecting the males?  Or, did the males select for three years and then allow the females to do the selecting during leap year?

But, worse yet, in a later edition published by L.A.  Burt Company, a “supplemental note” is added to discuss two letters which he thought supported the idea that sexual selection transformed the hairy animal into the hairless man.  Darwin’s correspondent (page 710) reports that a mandril seemed to be proud of a bare spot.  Can anything be less scientific than trying to guess what an animal is thinking about?  It would seem that this also was a subject about which it was “useless to speculate.”