Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/774

754 and it is also short and weak on the face, ears, and backs of the hands and feet. I have not observed eyebrows on the animals I have seen, but they may occur, and the eyelashes are fully developed.

The hair is of a reddish-brown color, something like burnt sienna, and the hair-tips on the back parts of the body are generally brown. In some individuals the hair is darker, of a russet or blackish brown; in others it is lighter, and in the latter case the breast and belly are of a yellowish white. The beard is sometimes dark yellow. Some individuals almost devoid of hair have been observed.

 

ITHIN the recollection of men now in middle life, opinion concerning the derivation of animals and plants was in a chaotic state. Among the unthinking there was tacit belief in creation by miracle, which formed an essential part of the creed of Christendom; and among the thinking there were two parties, each of which held an indefensible hypothesis. Immensely the larger of these parties, including nearly all whose scientific culture gave weight to their judgments, though not accepting literally the theologically orthodox doctrine, made a compromise between that doctrine and the doctrines which geologists had established; while opposed to them were some, mostly having no authority in science, who held a doctrine which was heterodox both theologically and scientifically. Professor Huxley, in his lecture on "The Coming of Age of the Origin of Species," remarks concerning the first of these parties as follows:

"One-and-twenty years ago, in spite of the work commenced by Hutton and continued with rare skill and patience by Lyell, the dominant view of the past history of the earth was catastrophic. Great and sudden physical revolutions, wholesale creations and extinctions of living beings, were the ordinary machinery of the geological epic brought into fashion by the misapplied genius of Cuvier. It was gravely maintained and taught that the end of every geological epoch was signalized by a cataclysm, by which every living being on the globe was swept away, to be replaced by a brand new creation when the world returned to quiescence. A scheme of nature which appeared to be modelled on the likeness of a succession of rubbers of whist, at the end of each of which the players upset the table and called for a new pack, did not seem to shock anybody.

I may be wrong, but I doubt if, at the present time, there is a single responsible representative of these opinions left. The progress of scientific geology has elevated the fundament principle of uniformitarianism, that the explanation 