Man's Place in Nature 149 



At the fourth International Congress of Zoology at Cambridge 

 (August 26th, 1898) I delivered an address on "Our present knowledge 

 of the Descent of Man." It was translated into English, enriched 

 with many valuable notes and additions, by my friend and pupil in 

 earlier days Dr Hans Gadow (Cambridge), and published under the 

 title : The Last Link ; our present knowledge of the Descent of 

 Man 1 . The determination of the chief animal forms that occur in 

 the line of our ancestry is there restricted to thirty types, and these 

 are distributed in six main groups. 



The first half of this " Progonotaxis hominis," which has no 

 support from fossil evidence, comprises three groups : (i) Protista 

 (unicellular organisms, 1 5) : (ii) Invertebrate Metazoa (Coelenteria 

 6 8, Vermalia 9 11): (iii) Monorrhine Vertebrates (Acrania 12 

 13, Cyclostoma 14 15). The second half, which is based on fossil 

 records, also comprises three groups : (iv) Palaeozoic cold-blooded 

 Craniota (Fishes 16 18, Amphibia 19, Reptiles 20) : (v) Mesozoic 

 Mammals (Monotrema 21, Marsupialia 22, Mallotheria 23): (vi) Ce- 

 nozoic Primates (Lemuridae 24 25, Tailed Apes 26 27, Anthropo- 

 morpha 28 30). An improved and enlarged edition of this hypothetic 

 " Progonotaxis hominis" was published in 1908, in my essay Unsere 

 AhnenreiJie 2 . 



If I have succeeded in furthering, in some degree, by these an- 

 thropological works, the solution of the great problem of Man's place 

 in nature, and particularly in helping to trace the definite stages in 

 our ancestral series, I owe the success, not merely to the vast progress 

 that biology has made in the last half century, but largely to the 

 luminous example of the great investigators who have applied them- 

 selves to the problem, with so much assiduity and genius, for a 

 century and a quarter I mean Goethe and Lamarck, Gegenbaur and 

 Huxley, but, above all, Charles Darwin. It was the great genius of 

 Darwin that first brought together the scattered material of biology 

 and shaped it into that symmetrical temple of scientific knowledge, 

 the theory of descent. It was Darwin who put the crown on the 

 edifice by his theory of natural selection. Not until this broad in- 

 ductive law was firmly established was it possible to vindicate the 

 special conclusion, the descent of man from a series of other Verte- 

 brates. By his illuminating discovery Darwin did more for anthro- 

 pology than thousands of those writers, who are more specifically 

 titled anthropologists, have done by their technical treatises. We 

 may, indeed, say that it is not merely as an exact observer and ingenious 

 experimenter, but as a distinguished anthropologist and far-seeing 



1 London, 1898. 



2 Festschrift zur 350-jahrigen Jubelfeier der Thilringer Universitat Jena. Jena, 

 1908. 



