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Updated: May 27, 2025
About a year ago Virchow, on a similar occasion, made a severe attack on the Darwinian position, and this year he is similarly outspoken. We make the following extracts from his long address to the Congress: "'Twenty years ago, when we met at Innspruck, it was precisely the moment when the Darwinian theory had made its first victorious mark throughout the world.
Modern science accepts the antiquity of the Neanderthal man, but the controversy has never ceased. The great Virchow declared the peculiarities of the bones to be the result of disease. Near Liege, in Belgium, not more than seventy miles from the Neanderthal, the Engis skull was found. After careful measurement it was proved not to differ materially from the skulls of modern Europeans.
When a cartilaginous tumour takes on active growth, it must be treated as malignant. The chondromas that are met with at the ends of the long bones in children and young adults form a group by themselves. They are usually related to the epiphysial cartilage, and it was suggested by Virchow that they take origin from islands of cartilage which have not been used up in the process of ossification.
A few days afterward, Virchow, the great pathologist, an active member of the "progressive" parliamentary party, hating new theories in politics just as much as in science violently assailed the Darwinian theory of organic evolution, and, moved by a very just presentiment, hurled against it this cry of alarm, this political anathema: "Darwinism leads directly to socialism."
Professor Virchow came to the same conclusion with regard to a skull from a Neolithic tomb which bore on the right parietal traces of an ancient cicatrized wound. He also tells us of the finding in Poland of a round piece of skull which had evidently been worn as an amulet. In the north of Europe similar discoveries have been made.
The Fortschrittspartei finds its intellectual beginnings, in the condensing of the hazy clouds of revolution in 1848, in the persons of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Freiherr von Stein. Politically, the party came into being in 1861, and Waldeck, von Hoverbeck, and Virchow are familiar names to students of German political history; later Eugen Richter was the leader of the party in the Reichstag.
In the year preceding the revolution there had been a bad harvest, and frightful stories were told of famine in the weaving districts of Silesia. Even before Virchow, in his free-spoken work on the famine- typhus, had faithfully described the full misery of those wretched sufferers, it had become apparent to the rulers in Berlin that something must be done to relieve the public distress.
Along with Virchow, we must name another of the older generation, the physiologist William Preyer, who combated “vitalism,” “dualism,” and “mechanism” with equal vehemence, and issued a manifesto, already somewhat solemn and official, against “vital force.” And yet he must undoubtedly be regarded as a vitalist by mechanists and vitalists alike.
Virchow discovered an arrow-head manufactory on the shores of Lake Burtneek, and in 1884 the Moscow Society of Natural Sciences made known the existence of important workshops near the Vetluga River, in the province of Kostroma, so that we know that in remote prehistoric times men lived and fought in a rigorous climate in districts but sparsely populated in our own day.
In fact, Virchow was certainly justified in saying that the whole town belonged to the Bronze age. Iron was still unknown, at least so far no trace of it has been found, either among the ruins of Troy or of the towns which succeeded it.
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