ied in obscurity, and the hypotheses to explain them dispense far
more largely with any basis of facts, than is the case with our
phylogenetic hypotheses; for these are more or less "objectively"
based on the facts of comparative anatomy and ontogenesis.

But no one of these historical hypotheses is so daring, so little
"certainly proved," as the group of very various and contradictory
hypotheses which have been put forward as to the antiquity and first
appearance of the human species; and Virchow asserts positively "The
pleistocene man is an universally accepted fact. The tertiary man is,
on the other hand, a problem, though indeed a problem which is already
under substantial discussion!" As if the distinction between the
tertiary and quarternary periods were not itself a geological
hypothesis, and as if the significance of the fossil animal-remains,
which play the largest part in it, did not also rest on mere
hypotheses which escape all certain proof! Where, then, is the actual
experiment "as the highest means of proof," which gives evidence for
these "certain facts"? The whole discussion in general about
prehistoric man, which Virchow has mixed up with his Munich address
(pp. 30, 31), is the clearest evidence of the uncritical spirit in
which he deals with these historical problems as "exact natural
sciences." He assures us that "not one single ape's skull, nor skull
of an anthropoid ape, has ever been found which could actually have
belonged to a human owner!" and he adds this sentence, in italics, "We
cannot teach, for we cannot regard it as a real acquisition of
science, that man is descended from the ape or from any other animal!"
Then evidently no alternative remains but that he is descended from a
god, or from a clod!

But let us go over the rest of the sciences to see what, according to
Virchow, may be taught in each without endangering the safety of
science. In the whole department of biology, as well as in
zoology--including anthropology--and in botany, instruction must be
limited to imparting those trifling fragments of knowledge which
either consist of mere descriptions of dry facts, or which supply an
explanation of them by mathematical formulas. Morphology must be
taught as mere descriptive anatomy and systematising, the history of
development as mere descriptive ontogenesis. Comparative anatomy and
phylogenesis, which by their explanatory hypotheses raise those dead
masses of facts to the place of tru