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(A dinner was given last night to Professor Häckel of Jena by French savants. In his speech, as reported in the Temp, he expressed gratification at the progress of evolutionist ideas among French men of science, and remarked that professors and preachers who ridiculed man's descent from the ape unwittingly furnished the best proof of it, their pride and childish vanity being foibles which might have been bequeathed by the ape. Man, however, did not descend from any known anthropoid, but was a branch of the catarhine monkeys of the Old World. The continuity of nature was daily becoming more evident, and superstition, mysticism, and teleology would give way to reason, causality, and mechanism. Among philosophic minds, at least, the believers in final causes of the universe, immutability of species, sterility of bastards, geological cataclysms, successive creations, and the late appearance of man were dying out. The primitive life-organisms were formed chemically by spontaneous generation at the bottom of the sea, like saline crystals in water. Nohow else could the origin of life be explained. Lamarck and Darwin had struck the last blow at the doctrine of final causes, and modern morphology was irreconcilable not only with the dogma of the Creation, but with that of Providence, or the vague idealist pantheism of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Hartmann. The transformation of living organisms under the influence of adaptation, hereditary selection, and struggle for existence could not, indeed, be mathematically demonstrated, but its existence could not be doubted any more than psychology or social science, and anomalies would soon be explained by the laws of mechanics were all the elements procurable; but the instability of the elements constituting the tissue of organised beings made biological problems very complex. The speech was much applauded.— Times Paris correspondence, 30th August, 1879.)