This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1888 Excerpt: ...to teach that everything can become everything, it would take away with one hand what it has given with the other.' But that is precisely what evolution does teach. And then he writes, p. 91, vol. I.: "The theory of evolution to which I hold, and which seems to me confirmed more and more by every discovery that has ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1888 Excerpt: ...to teach that everything can become everything, it would take away with one hand what it has given with the other.' But that is precisely what evolution does teach. And then he writes, p. 91, vol. I.: "The theory of evolution to which I hold, and which seems to me confirmed more and more by every discovery that has lately been made in the growth of nature, and in the growth of the human mind as represented in language is this, that evolution in both starts from distinct beginnings and leads to distinct ends. Ex aliquo fit aliquid." But that is precisely the doctrine of development, and not of evolution, which knows 237 nothing, and can know nothing of either " distinct beginnings" or of "distinct ends." The Professor holds that only those animals have the power of ratiocination, and therefore of speech or of speech and therefore of reason, who have the mental tubercle. This tubercle has nothing to do with mind, the adjective not being derived from mens, mind, but from mentum, chin. "It is, in fact, a small bony projection or excrescence, in which the muscle of the tongue is inserted." (I. 83.) He tells us that in the skull discovered in i866 in the cave of La Naulette, Belgium, the mental tubercle is absent, and states the argument of Professor de Mortillet to the effect that since speech is produced by the tongue, whose movements are effected mainly by the action of the muscle inserted in the mental tubercle, which is essential to the possession of language, and this tubercle was absent from the La Naulette skull, therefore its possessor was incapable of articulate speech. Granted: but what else does that prove? Certainly not that man could not always have been rational because one man could not speak. But this is th...
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