of the pathos
of Du Bois-Reymond's "ignorabimus." He is the neutral, prosaic scientist,
who will let nothing "tempt him to a transcendental consideration,"(14)
either theological or naturalistic, who holds tenaciously to matters of
fact, who, without absolutely rejecting a general theory, will not concern
himself about it, except to point out every difficulty in the way of it;
in short, he is the representative of a mood that is the ideal of every
investigator and the despair of every theoriser.

His lecture of 1869 already indicates his subsequent attitude. "Considered
logically and speculatively" the Theory of Descent seems to him
"excellent,"(15) indeed a logical moral(!) hypothesis, but unproved in
itself, and erroneous in many of its particular propositions. As far back
as 1858, before the publication of Darwin's great work, he stated at the
Naturalists' Congress in Carlsruhe, that the origin of one species out of
another appeared to him a necessary scientific inference, but----And
throughout the whole lecture he alternates between favourable recognition
of the theory in general, and emphasis of the difficulties which confront
it in detail. The skull, which, according to Goethe's theory, has evolved
from three modified vertebrae, is fundamentally different in man and
monkeys, both in regard to its externals, crests, ridges and shape, and
especially in regard to the nature of the cavity which it forms for the
brain. Specifically distinctive differences in the development and
structure of the rest of the body must also be taken into account. The
so-called ape-like structures in the skull and the rest of the body, which
occasionally occur in man (idiots, microcephaloids, &c.) cannot be
regarded as atavisms and therefore as proofs of the Theory of Descent;
they are of a pathological nature, entirely facts _sui generis_, and "not
to be placed in a series with the normal results of evolution." A man
modified by disease "is still thoroughly a man, not a monkey."

Virchow continued to maintain this attitude and persisted in this kind of
argument. He energetically rejected all attempts to find "pithecoid"
characters in the prehistoric remains of man. He declared the narrow and
less arched forehead, the elliptical form, and the unusually large frontal
cavities of the "Neanderthal skull" found in the Wupperthal in 1856, to be
simply pathological features, which occur as such in certain examples of
_homo sapiens_.(16) He expl