From this very decided turn at Munich until his death, twenty-five years afterwards, Virchow was an indefatigable and very influential opponent of evolution. In his annual appearances at congresses he has always contested it, and has obstinately clung to his statement that "it is quite certain that man does not descend from the ape or any other animal." To the question: "Whence does he come, then?" he had no answer, and retired to the resigned position of the Agnostic, which was common before Darwin's time: "We do not know how life arose, and how the various species came into the world." His son-in-law, Professor Rabl, has tried to draw attention once more to his earlier conception, and has declared that even in later years Virchow often recognised the truth of evolution in private conversation. This only makes it the more regrettable that he always said the contrary in public. The fact remains that ever since the opponents of evolution, especially the reactionaries and clericals, have appealed to the authority of Virchow. The wholly reactionary system that this led to has been well described by Robert Drill (1902) in his _Virchow as a Reactionary_. How little qualified the great pathologist was to appreciate the scientific bases of the pithecoid theory is clear from the absurd statement he made, in the opening speech of the Vienna Congress of Anthropologists, in 1894, that man might just as well be claimed to descend from a sheep or an elephant as from an ape. Any competent zoologist can see from this the little knowledge Virchow had of systematic zoology and comparative anatomy. However, he retained his authority as president of the German Anthropological Society, which remained impervious to Darwinian ideas. Even such vigorous controversialists as Carl Vogt, and such scientific partisans of the ape-man of Neanderthal as Schaafhausen, could make no impression. Virchow's authority was equally great for twenty years in the Berlin Press, both Liberal and Conservative. The _Kreutzzeitung_ and the _Evangelische Kirchenzeitung_ were delighted that "the learned progressist was conservative in the best sense of the word as regards evolution." The ultramontane _Germania_ rejoiced that the powerful representative of pure science had, "with a few strokes of his cudgel, reduced to impotence" the absurd ape-theory and its chief protagonist, Ernst Haeckel. The _National-Zeitung_ could not sufficiently thank the free-thinking, popular leader for having lifted from us for ever the oppressive mountain of the theory of simian descent. The editor of the _Volks-Zeitung_, Bernstein, who has done so much for the spread of knowledge in his excellent popular manuals of science, obstinately refused to admit articles that ventured to support the erroneous ape-theory "refuted" by Virchow.