of the Formica Polyerges thus
formed. There seems to be no limit here to the exuberance of his fancy,
and we cannot but think that we detect one of those hints by which Mr.
Darwin indicates the application of his system from the lower animals to
man himself, when he dwells so pointedly upon the fact that it is always
the _black_ ant which is enslaved by his other coloured and more
fortunate brethren. "The slaves are black!" We believe that, if we had
Mr. Darwin in the witness-box, and could subject him to a moderate
cross-examination, we should find that he believed that the tendency of
the lighter-coloured races of mankind to prosecute the negro slave-trade
was really a remains, in their more favoured condition, of the
"extraordinary and odious instinct" which had possessed them before they
had been "improved by natural selection" from Formica Polyerges into
Homo. This at least is very much the way in which (p. 479) he slips in
quite incidentally the true identity of man with the horse, the bat, and
the porpoise:--

The framework of bones being the same in the hand of a man, wing of a
bat, fin of a porpoise, and leg of the horse, the same number of
vertebrae forming the neck of the giraffe and of the elephant, and
innumerable other such facts, at once explain themselves on the theory
of descent with slow and slight successive modifications.--p. 479.

Such assumptions as these, we once more repeat, are most dishonourable
and injurious to science; and though, out of respect to Mr. Darwin's
high character and to the tone of his work, we have felt it right to
weigh the "argument" again set by him before us in the simple scales of
logical examination, yet we must remind him that the view is not a new
one, and that it has already been treated with admirable humour when
propounded by another of his name and of his lineage. We do not think
that, with all his matchless ingenuity, Mr. Darwin has found any
instance which so well illustrates his own theory of the improved
descendant under the elevating influences of natural selection
exterminating the progenitor whose specialities he has exaggerated as he
himself affords us in this work. For if we go back two generations we
find the ingenious grandsire of the author of the _Origin of Species_
speculating on the same subject, and almost in the same manner with his
more daring descendant.

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