Warnings of this kind have come occasionally from Du Bois-Reymond, but the true type of this group, and its mode of thought, is Virchow. It will repay us and suffice us to make acquaintance with it through him. His opposition to Darwinism and the theory of descent was directed at its most salient point: the [pg 107] descent of man from the apes. In lectures and treatises, at zoological and anthropological congresses, especially at the meetings of his own Anthropological-Ethnological Society in Berlin, from his “VortrÄge Über Menschen-und Affen-SchÄdel” (Lectures on the Skulls of Man and Apes, 1869), to the disputes over Dubois' Pithecanthropus erectus in the middle of the nineties, he threw the whole weight of his immense learning—ethnological and anthropological, osteological, and above all “craniological”—into the scale against the Theory of Descent and its supporters. Virchow has therefore been reckoned often enough among the anti-Darwinians, and has been quoted by apologists and others as against Darwinism, and he has given reason for this, since he has often taken the field against “the Darwinists” or has scoffed at their “longing for a pro-anthropos.”13 Sometimes even it has been suggested that he was actuated by religious motives, as when he occasionally championed not only freedom for science, but, incidentally, the right of existence for “the churches,” leaving, for instance, in his theory of psychical life, gaps in knowledge which faith might occupy in moderation and modesty. But this last proves nothing. With Virchow's altogether unemotional nature it is unlikely that religious or spiritual motives had any rÔle in the establishment of his convictions, and in Haeckel's naÏve blustering at religion, there is, so to speak, more [pg 108] religion than in the cold-blooded connivance with which Virchow leaves a few openings in otherwise frozen ponds for the ducks of faith to swim in! And he has nothing 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 [pg 109] evolved from three modified vertebrÆ, 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 explained the abnormal appearance of the jaw from the Moravian cave of Schipka as a result of the retention of teeth,17 accompanied by directly “antipithecoid” characters.