of contemporary science. “Science,” says a writer in the _Atlantic Monthly_ (Oct., 1915), “has turned all philosophy out of doors except that which clings to its skirts; it has thrown contempt on all learning that does not depend upon it; and it has bribed the sketches by giving us immense material comforts.” Here, however, we are concerned with the fact, rather than the justice, of this discrimination which the scientific world makes between philosopher and philosopher. Certain it is that Robinson has received no end of encomiums from scientists, who apparently lack the literary gifts to expound their own philosophy, and that his claim to represent the views of a large and influential section of the scientific world is, in all probability, entirely correct. It is this manifest approval of scientific men which lends especial interest to the remarks of this scientific dilettante, and we shall quote them as expressing the prevalent scientific view on the origin of man, a view which, with but slight variations, has persisted from the time of Darwin down to the present day. “The recognition,” says Robinson, “that mankind is a species of animal, is, like other important discoveries, illuminating.” (_Science_, July 28, 1922, p. 74.) To refer to the recognition of man’s animality as a _discovery_ is a conceit too stupid for mere words to castigate. Surely, there was no need of the profound research or delicate precision of modern science to detect the all too obvious similarity existing between man and beast. Mankind did not have to await the advent of an “enlightened” nineteenth, or twentieth century to be assured of the truth of a commonplace so trite and palpable. Even the “benighted” scholastics of medieval infamy had wit enough to define man as a rational animal. Indeed, it would be a libel on human intelligence to suppose that anyone, in the whole history of human thought, was ever sufficiently fatuous to dispute the patent fact that man is a sentient organism compounded of flesh, blood, bone, and sinew like the brute. The “discovery” that man is a species of animal dates from the year one of human existence, and it is now high time for the novelty of this discovery to be worn off.