A PAMPHLET

WHICH the reader need not read. It is quite as easy to understand the book without it.

“The Review of Comparative Biology in its October issue contained a short and modest paper over the name of Henry Upton which is destined to influence modern thought more profoundly than anything that has appeared since Lux Mundi or the Origin of Species. Henry Upton has been taken from us. Or, to use a phrase consecrated by his own reverent quotation of it, he has ‘Passed beyond the Veil,’ he has crossed the bar; but short as the time is since this brief essay was given to the world, his name is already famous.“You will have heard the echoes of passionate discussions upon his famous theory; it is my business this afternoon to put before you in clear and popular language that you can easily understand, what that theory was; and when I have done so I make no doubt that you will see why it has been thought so transcendently important.

“Briefly, Henry Upton declared himself finally convinced that between Man and the Simius Gabiensis there existed a differentiation so marked as to destroy all possibility of any recent common origin for the two species.

“When I add that Simius Gabiensis is but the technical name for the Ringtailed Baboon of our childhood you will at once appreciate what a revolution such a pronouncement must work if it can be sustained: and it has been sustained!

“It is common knowledge and will be familiar to the youngest child in this room that the Ringtailed Baboon is the highest of the Anthropoids, and the one nearest approaching the majesty of the Human Species—Homo Sapiens; and if between him and ourselves the link of affinity prove far removed, it seems indeed as though the whole edifice of modern biology and of modern thought itself will fall to the ground.

“The superficial differences to be discovered between a cleanly and well-bred gentleman and the Ringtailed Baboon are common property: the beard in the Anthropoid is not so clearly defined as in the allied organism of Man, but covers the whole face; the superciliary arch is more prominent, the diaphragm tessarated and refulgent, while the Cardiac Aneries are at once paler and less vasculate in form: the rings upon the tail are of course peculiar to the Simian, and almost universally absent in the human species, while the speech of the latter is far more complex and articulate than that of the former.

“But I need not detain this cultured audience with considerations quite unworthy of physical science. All the weight of real evidence pointed to the close relationship between the two types, and it was a commonplace of the classroom that in all fundamentals the two animals betrayed an ancestor less remote than that of the dog and the wolf. Now, since Henry Upton’s work appeared, we are certain that that ancestor is more remote than the ancestor of the hippopotamus and the Jersey cow, and probably more remote than that of the mongoose and the Great Auk.

“In every text-book we read (and we believed the statement) that between a really poor man and the highest specimens of our race lay a gulf wider than that which separated the former from the Ringtailed Baboon and even from the Gorilla and the Barbary Ape. To-day all that is gone!

“Now let me turn to the evidence. Briefly, again, Henry Upton proved that CARYLL’S GANGLIA were not, as had been imagined, unimportant or useless organs, but were organically necessary to the full conduct of man.“It had of course been known since Caryll first described and mapped these ganglia, that they were present in Man and absent in all other animals. But they were not unique in this, and the obscure part which they seemed to play in our economy attracted little attention from the student. Suddenly these humble agglutinations of organic matter were lifted into the blaze of fame by an Englishman whose name will not perish so long as our civilisation endures. For Henry Upton showed that in these ganglia lay the capital distinction between man and his congener; if I, myself, for instance, differ in any way from ‘Pongo’ in Regent’s Park, it is to Caryll’s Ganglia, under Providence, that I owe the privilege.

“Henry Upton was not the man to proceed upon a priori reasoning, or to state as a conclusion what was still a bare hypothesis. He had suspected the truth ten years before committing it to print: they were ten years of anxiety, nay, of agony, during which a bolder or less scrupulous man might snatch from him the merit of prior discovery; but he felt it was his duty to Science to continue the vast labour and the patient research, until he could speak once and for all.

“Upton tabulated in all the enormous number of 57,752 recorded experiments. He first noted the comparative sizes of the ganglia, in children and adults, in women and in men, showing them to be larger in men than in women, and in children rudimentary before the seventh year. He next proved that in certain professions, notably in those of the money-lender, the solicitor and the politician, hypertrophy of the ganglia was to be discovered. The conclusions to which this pointed will soon be evident. His theory already began to take shape. Luckily for English science, this great man was possessed of private means. He organised a staff of enthusiastic young workers who occupied themselves in treading upon the toes of people in omnibuses, sitting upon top hats, asking direct questions of slight acquaintances concerning their financial affairs, and coughing violently and with long, uninterrupted spasms at the most exciting moments of melodramatic plays. The result was in each case tabulated, and in over 5·08 per cent. of the cases it was possible with care to discover the position of the ganglia in those who responded to the stimuli. Without a single exception the importance of the ganglia varied directly with the self-restraint exercised against such stimuli. Those who struck out, swore, or in any other way betrayed immediate violence, were found to possess small and sometimes partially atrophied C. G’s. Those who protested sullenly or confined themselves to angry glances were normal; those who contained themselves as though nothing had happened, invariably possessed ganglia of a large and peculiarly healthy type, while those who actually expressed enjoyment and begged for a repetition of the performance had ganglia of so astonishing a size as to cause protuberances on either side of the head, for Caryll’s Ganglia lie (as most of you probably know) a little south-east and by east of the Aural Cavity.

“It might by this time have seemed sufficiently proved that Caryll’s Ganglia were the seat of all that restraint and balance upon which human society depends; but Upton was not satisfied until he had clinched the process of proof by a negative experiment upon animals:—And here let me point out in passing that had certain well-meaning fanatics their own way, this great revelation would never have been made. The horse, the pig, the common house-fly, the bee, the dog and the wild goose, to give but a few examples, were severally tested, and in each case it was discovered that a clout, a fillip, or any other simple stimulus was at once responded to. In no case was a trace of Caryll’s Ganglia to be found.

“You all know the end!

“The essay was printed, Upton’s name had already flown to the utmost corners of the globe, when he read in some obscure narrative of travel that the little armadillo that can sleep without a pillow, though possessing no ganglia, was capable of the same balance and restraint as man, could control himself under all but the most violent stimuli, conceal his most poignant necessities, and smile in the presence of death.

“Upton was a Scientist of the Scientists. One single exception and he would retract from his position. He sailed for the Amazon, interviewed the armadillo, but at the first pin he thrust into the fleshy portion of the animal’s steaks, a little below the armoured belt, it belied the false report by turning savagely round and biting off his head. His remains were reverently brought home to London. He lies in Westminster Abbey, the last and perhaps the greatest of martyrs to scientific truth.

“If Henry Upton’s immortal achievement seems for a moment to have broken down the very keystone in the arch of social progress, and to have made null the whole structure of biological truth; if it leaves Man no longer propped up by a knowledge of cousinship and brotherhood with the beasts of the field, but all alone, an exile upon earth, nevertheless we must take courage. The Bishop of Shoreham has told us (Etc., etc., etc.).”

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