tlbe /iDorse ^Lectures for 1895 



THE WHENCE AND WHITHER 



OF MAN 



A BRIEF HISTORY OF MAN'S ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT, AND 

 OF THE EVOLUTION OF HIS MORAL AND RELIGIOUS CAPACITIES 

 THROUGH CONFORMITY TO ENVIRONMENT 



By JOHN M. TYLER 



Professor of Biology, Amherst College 



$f75 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, PUBLISHERS 



This work is a solidification of some new matter with the 

 substance of the ten Morse Lectures delivered at Union Theo- 

 logical Seminary in the spring of 1895. Professor Tyler aims 

 to trace the development of man from the simple living sub- 

 stance to his position at present, paying attention to incidental 

 facts merely as incidental and contributory. He keeps always 

 in view the successive accomplishments of life as they appear 

 in the person of accepted general truth, rather than in the guise 

 of the facts of progress. 



He begins by saying : "We take for granted the probable 

 truth of the theory of evolution as stated by Mr. Darwin, and 

 that it applies to man as really as to any lower animal." He 

 assumes that an acceptable historian of biology must possess a 

 genealogical tree of the animal kingdom, and adds that a 

 knowledge of the sequence of dominant functions or " physio- 

 logical dynasties," is quite as necessary to his inquiry as a 

 history of the development of anatomical details. Since the 

 germs of the future are always concealed in the history of the 

 present, he claims that " if we can trace this sequence of domi- 

 nant functions, whose evolution has filled past ages, we can 

 safely foretell something, at least, of man's future development." 



The possibility of making false trails, at times, should not 

 deter the investigator ; for what he would establish is not the 

 history of a single human race, nor of the movements of a cen- 

 tury, but an understanding of the development of animal life 

 through ages. "And only," says Professor Tyler, " when we 

 have a biological history can we have any satisfactory concep- 

 tion of environment." The book concludes with a brief notice 

 of the modern theories of heredity and variation advanced by 

 Nageli and Weismann. 



