MR. BELLOC’S ADVENTURES AMONG THE SUB-MEN: MANIFEST TERROR OF THE
NEANDERTHALER
From Mr. Belloc’s feats with Natural Selection we come to his
adventures among his ancestors and the fall of man. These are, if
possible, even more valiant than his beautiful exposure of the
“half-educated assurance” of current biological knowledge. He rushes
about the arena, darting from point to point, talking of my ignorance
of the “main recent European work in Anthropology,” and avoiding
something with extraordinary skill and dexterity. What it is he is
avoiding I will presently explain. No one who has read my previous
articles need be told that not a single name, not a single paper, is
cited from that galaxy of “main recent European” anthropology. With
one small exception. There is a well-known savant, M. Marcellin Boule,
who wrote of the Grottes de Grimaldi in 1906. Some facetious person
seems to have written to Mr. Belloc and told him that M. Boule in 1906
“definitely proved the exact opposite” of the conclusions given by Mr.
Wright in his _Quaternary Ice Age_ (1914), and quoted in my _Outline_.
Mr. Belloc writes this down, elevates M. Boule to the magnificence of
“Boule” simply and follows up with the habitual insults. By counting
from his one fixed mathematical point, _zero_ in some dimension unknown
to me, he concludes that I must be twenty years out of date, though the
difference between 1906 and 1914, by ordinary ways of reckoning, is
really not minus twenty but plus eight.
The same ungracious humorist seems to have stuffed up Mr. Belloc
with a story that for the last twenty years the climate of the
earth has ceased to vary with the eccentricity of the earth’s
orbit, and that any natural consequences of the precession of the
equinoxes no longer occur; that climate has, in fact, cut loose from
astronomical considerations, and that you can find out all about it
in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_. You cannot. Mr. Belloc should have
tried. Some day he must find time to puzzle out M. Boule’s curve of
oscillation of the Mediterranean and correlate it with Penck’s, and go
into the mystery of certain Moustierian implements that M. Boule says
are not Moustierian; and after that he had better read over the little
discussion about changes of climate in the _Outline of History_--it is
really quite simply put--and see what it is I really said and what his
leg-pulling friend has been up to with him in that matter. It may be
kinder to Mr. Belloc to help him with a hint. Croll made an excellent
book in which he pointed out a number of astronomical processes which
must produce changes of climate. He suggested that these processes
were sufficient to account for the fluctuations of the glacial age.
They are not. But they remain perfectly valid causes of climatic
variation. Croll is no more done for than Darwin is done for. That is
where Mr. Belloc’s friend let Mr. Belloc down.
But Mr. Belloc does not always work on the information of facetious
friends, and sometimes one is clearly in the presence of the unassisted
expert controversialist. When, for example, I say that the Tasmanians
are not racially Neanderthalers, but that they are Neanderthaloid,
he can bring himself to alter the former word also to Neanderthaloid
in order to allege an inconsistency. And confident that most of his
Catholic readers will not check him back by my book, he can ascribe to
me views about race for which there is no shadow of justification. But
it is disagreeable to me to follow up such issues, they concern Mr.
Belloc much more than they do the living questions under discussion,
and I will not even catalogue what other such instances of unashamed
controversy occur.