VIII 



CHARLES DARWIN AS AN ANTHROPOLOGIST 



BY ERNST HAECKEL. 



Professor of Zoology in the University of Jena. 



THE great advance that anthropology has made in the second half of 

 the nineteenth century is due, in the first place, to Darwin's discovery 

 of the origin of man. No other problem in the whole field of 

 research is so momentous as that of " Man's place in nature," which 

 was justly described by Huxley (1863) as the most fundamental of 

 all questions. Yet the scientific solution of this problem was im- 

 possible until the theory of descent had been established. 



It is now a hundred years since the great French biologist 

 Jean Lamarck published his Philosophic Zoologique. By a re- 

 markable coincidence the year in which that work was issued, 1809, 

 was the year of the birth of his most distinguished successor, Charles 

 Darwin. Lamarck had already recognised that the descent of man 

 from a series of other Vertebrates that is, from a series of Ape-like 

 Primates was essentially involved in the general theory of trans- 

 formation which he had erected on a broad inductive basis ; and he 

 had sufficient penetration to detect the agencies that had been at 

 work in the evolution of the erect bimanous man from the arboreal 

 and quadrumanous ape. He had, however, few empirical arguments 

 to advance in support of his hypothesis, and it could not be established 

 until the further development of the biological sciences the found- 

 ing of comparative embryology by Baer (1828) and of the cell-theory 

 by Schleiden and Schwann (1838), the advance of physiology under 

 Johannes Miiller (1833), and the enormous progress of palaeontology 

 and comparative anatomy between 1820 and 1860 provided this 

 necessary foundation. Darwin was the first to coordinate the ample 

 results of these lines of research. With no less comprehensiveness 

 than discrimination he consolidated them as a basis of a modified 

 theory of descent, and associated with them his own theory of natural 

 selection, which we take to be distinctive of " Darwinism " in the 



