gin of species were
quite compatible with the faith of the Church.

If we consider all these utterances of Darwin in regard to religion and
to his outlook on life (Weltanschauung), we shall see at least so much,
that religious reflection could in no way have influenced him in regard
to the writing and publishing of his book on "The Descent of Man".
Darwin had early won for himself freedom of thought, and to this freedom
he remained true to the end of his life, uninfluenced by the customs and
opinions of the world around him.

Darwin was thus inwardly fortified and armed against the host of
calumnies, accusations, and attacks called forth by the publication of
the "Origin of Species", and to an even greater extent by the appearance
of the "Descent of Man". But in his defence he could rely on the aid of
a band of distinguished auxiliaries of the rarest ability. His faithful
confederate, Huxley, was joined by the botanist Hooker, and, after
longer resistance, by the famous geologist Lyell, whose "conversion"
afforded Darwin peculiar satisfaction. All three took the field with
enthusiasm in defence of the natural descent of man. From Wallace, on
the other hand, though he shared with him the idea of natural selection,
Darwin got no support in this matter. Wallace expressed himself in a
strange manner. He admitted everything in regard to the morphological
descent of man, but maintained, in a mystic way, that something else,
something of a spiritual nature must have been added to what man
inherited from his animal ancestors. Darwin, whose esteem for Wallace
was extraordinarily high, could not understand how he could give
utterance to such a mystical view in regard to man; the idea seemed
to him so "incredibly strange" that he thought some one else must have
added these sentences to Wallace's paper.

Even now there are thinkers who, like Wallace, shrink from applying to
man the ultimate consequences of the theory of descent. The idea
that man is derived from ape-like forms is to them unpleasant and
humiliating.

So far I have been depicting the development of Darwin's work on the
descent of man. In what follows I shall endeavour to give a condensed
survey of the contents of the book.

It must at once be said that the contents of Darwin's work fall into two
parts, dealing with entirely different subjects. "The Descent of Man"
includes a very detailed investigation in regard to secondary sexual
characters in the animal seri