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 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.
The proceedings at the meetings of the Ethnological Society in 1895, at which Dubois was present, had an almost dramatic character.(18) In the diverse opinions of Dubois, Virchow, Nehring, Kollmann, Krause and others, we have almost an epitome of the present state of the Darwinian question. Virchow doubted whether the parts put together by Dubois (the head of a femur, two molar teeth, and the top of a skull) belonged to the same individual at all, disputed the calculations as to the large capacity of the skull, placed against Dubois’ very striking and clever drawing of the curves of the skull-outline, which illustrated, with the help of the Pithecanthropus, the gradual transition from the skull of a monkey to that of man, his own drawing, according to which the Pithecanthropus curve simply coincides with that of a gibbon (_Hylobates_), and asserted that the remains discovered were those of a species of gibbon, refusing even to admit that they represented a new genus of monkeys. He held fast to his _ceterum censeo_: “As yet no diluvial discovery has been made which can be referred to a man of a pithecoid type.” Indeed, his polemic or “caution” in regard to the Theory of Descent went even further. He not only refused to admit the proof of the descent of man from monkey, he would not even allow that the descent of one race from another has been demonstrated.(19) In spite of all the plausible hypotheses it remains “so far only a _pium desiderium_.” The race obstinately maintains its specific distinctness, and resists variation, or gradual transformation into another. The negro remains a negro in America, and the European colonist of Australia remains a European.