Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/717

699 it is for its honor in the present and its prospects in the future that the truth should appear; and to enlighten them, whether it be concerning cannons or silk-manufactures, telescopes or crystals, jewelry or hardware, it is felt that science is indispensable, and men of science are appealed to."

Beginning with 1842, M. de Quatrefages made a number of scientific voyages along the coasts of the ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, and in Italy and Sicily, which furnished him with the materials for a series of brilliant articles in the "Revue des Deux Mondes," some of which were afterward published (1854) in a volume entitled "Souvenirs d'un Naturaliste" ("Recollections of a Naturalist"). This was published in London in 1857 as "Rambles of a Naturalist on the Coasts of France, Spain, and Sicily." Among other works which he has published on subjects of general zoölogy are, translating the titles: "Considerations on the Zoölogical Characteristics of the Rodents" (1840); "On the Organization of the Invertebrate Animals of the Coasts of the British Channel" (in the "Annales des Sciences Naturelles," 1844); "Researches on the Nervous System, the Embryogeny, the Sensory Organs, and the Circulation of the Annelids" (ibid., 1844–1850); "On the Affinities and the Analogies of Earth-Worms and Leeches" (ibid., 1852); "On the Natural History of the Teredos" (ibid., 1848 and 1849). Invited by the Academy of Sciences to investigate the silk-worm disease, he published in 1859 "Studies," and in 1860 "New Researches on the Present Diseases of Silk-Worms." "Natural History of Marine and Fresh-Water Annelids" (1866); and "La Rochelle and its Environs" (1876). The later studies of M. de Quatrefages have been more predominantly in the direction of anthropology; and it is as an anthropologist that he is best known. In "The Human Species," which appeared in 1879, he took distinct ground in favor of the unity of the race.

The question whether there exists a fundamental distinction between man and animals he answered in the affirmative, and justified his position by the three considerations that man has the perception of moral good and evil, independently of all physical welfare and suffering; that man believes in superior beings who can exercise an influence over his destiny; and that he believes in the prolongation of his existence after this life. The author's idea of the moral and religious quality in man is conveyed in the sentence, "The learned mathematician, who seeks by the aid of the most profound abstractions the solution of some great problem, is completely without the moral or religious sphere into which, on the contrary, the ignorant, simple-minded man enters when he struggles, suffers, or dies for justice or for his faith." The different colors of men are regarded as results of accidental variations. Concerning the origin of the human species, M. de Quatrefages does not hesitate to reply in the negative to the question whether it is possible to explain the appearance on our globe of a being "which