delight, and then
asserts that "the quarternary man" is an universally-accepted fact.
Quite apart from this statement, we have seen that Virchow can never
attain to a profound and really scientific study of anthropology
simply for this reason, that he is lacking in that comprehensive
knowledge of comparative morphology which is indispensable to it; nay,
comparative anatomy and ontogenesis must be, according to him,
unpermitted speculations and the phylogenesis of man, the key to all
the most important questions of anthropology, being based upon these,
is devoid of all certain proof. All the more must we wonder at the
speculative levity with which even the sceptic Virchow in the
"Primeval History of Man" and "Fossil Anthropology," embarks in the
most hazardous conjectures, and gives out uncertain, subjective
hypotheses as certain, objective facts.

There is, in fact, at the present day no department of science in
which the wildest and most untenable hypotheses have blossomed out so
freely as in anthropology and ethnology, so-called. All the
phylogenetic hypotheses which I myself have put forward in my
"Evolution of Man" as to the animal ancestry of man, or in my "Natural
History of Creation" as to the affinities of animal races--all the
other genealogical hypotheses which are now advanced by numerous
zoologists and botanists as to the phylogenetic evolution of the
animal and plant worlds--all these hypotheses together, which Virchow
rejects in a lump, are, critically considered as hypotheses, far
better grounded in facts, far better supported by facts, than the
majority of those innumerable airy and fanciful hypotheses with which,
for the last twelve years, the "Archiv fuer Anthropologie" and
"Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie," edited by Virchow and Bastian, have
filled their columns. This last periodical has at least the merit of
being a tolerably consistent opponent of the doctrine of evolution,
while in the former, during twelve years, essays on both sides have
been mixed up in cheerful confusion. And how fanciful are the
short-sighted hypotheses which there blossom forth from the mixed mass
of facts, chaotically flung together. Only think of the disputes over
the stone age, bronze age, and iron age; think of the motley
discussions as to the varieties of skull-conformation and their
significance; on the races of man, the migrations of peoples and the
like. Most of these very intricate historical problems are far more
bur