Sir John Lubbock, 3rd Baronet

The high antiquity of man has recently been demonstrated by the labors of a host of eminent men, beginning with M. Boucher de Perthes, and this is the indispensable basis for understanding his origin.

I shall therefore take this conclusion for granted, and may refer my readers to the admirable treatises of Sir Charles Lyell, Sir John Lubbock, and others.

nor shall I have occasion to do more than to allude to the amount of difference between man and the anthropomorphous apes.

For Professor Huxley, in the opinion of most competent judges, has conclusively shown that in every visible character man differs less from the higher apes than these do from the lower members of the same order of primates.

The conclusion that man is the co-descendant with other species of some ancient, lower, and extinct form is not in any degree new.

Lamarck long ago came to this conclusion, which has lately been maintained by several eminent naturalists and philosophers.

For instance, by Wallace, Huxley, Lyell, Voigt, Lubbock, Buckner, Roll, etc.

Footnote 1.

There she sits, friendless upon her throne through the long night of her life, cut off from the consoling sympathies and sweet companionship and loving endearments which she craves by the gilded barriers of her awful rank, a forlorn exile in her own house and home, weary object of formal ceremonies and machine-made worship, winged child of the sun, native to the free air and the blue skies and the flowery fields, doomed by the splendid accident of her birth to trade this priceless heritage for a black captivity, a tinsel grandeur, and a loveless life, with shame and insult at the end and a cruel death, and condemned by the human instinct in her to hold the bargain valuable.

Huber, Lubbock, Maeterlinck, in fact all the great authorities, are agreed in denying that the bee is a member of the human family.

I do not know why they have done this, but I think it is from dishonest motives.

Why, the innumerable facts brought to light by their own painstaking and exhaustive experiments prove that if there is a master fool in the world, it is the bee.

There she sits, friendless upon her throne through the long night of her life, cut off from the consoling sympathies and sweet companionship and loving endearments which she craves by the gilded barriers of her awful rank, a forlorn exile in her own house and home, weary object of formal ceremonies and machine-made worship, winged child of the sun, native to the free air and the blue skies and the flowery fields, doomed by the splendid accident of her birth to trade this priceless heritage for a black captivity, a tinsel grandeur, and a loveless life, with shame and insult at the end and a cruel death, and condemned by the human instinct in her to hold the bargain valuable.

Huber, Lubbock, Maeterlinck, in fact all the great authorities, are agreed in denying that the bee is a member of the human family.

I do not know why they have done this, but I think it is from dishonest motives.

Why, the innumerable facts brought to light by their own painstaking and exhaustive experiments prove that if there is a master fool in the world, it is the bee.