AMERICAN ZOOLOGISTS AND EVOLUTION. 197 



and the offspring of one becomes of no greater interest than those 

 of a stranger, "and in general the duration of the feelings which in- 

 sure the protection of the offspring is determined by the duration of 

 the infancy. . . . 



" Hence if long infancies could have suddenly come into existence 

 among a primitive race of ape-like men, the race would have quickly 

 perished from inadequate persistence of parental affection." Prof. 

 Fiske, in a most reasonable way, shows that " the prolonged helpless- 

 ness of the offspring must keep the parents together for longer and 

 longer periods in successive epochs ; and when at last the association 

 is so long kept up that the older children are growing mature while 

 the younger ones still need protection, the family relations begin to 

 become permanent. The parents have lived so long in company that 

 to seek new companionships involves some disturbance of ingrained 

 habits, and meanwhile the older sons are more likely to continue their 

 original association with each other than to establish associations 

 with strangers, since they have common objects to achieve, and com- 

 mon enmities bequeathed, inherited or acquired with neighboring 

 families." 



In his chapter on the moral genesis of man Fiske maintains that 

 "the prolongation of human infancy accompanying the development 

 of intelligence, and the correlative extension of parental feeling, are 

 facts established by observation wherever observation is possible ; 

 and to maintain that the correlation of these phenomena was kept up 

 during an epoch which is hidden from observation, and can only be 

 known by inference, is to make a genuine induction, involving no 

 other assumption than that the operations of Nature are uniform. To 

 him who is still capable of believing that the human race was created 

 by miracle in a single day, with all its attributes, physical and psy- 

 chical, compounded and proportioned, just as they now are, the pres- 

 ent inquiry is of course devoid of significance. But for the evolu- 

 tionist there would seem to be no alternative but to accept, when 

 once propounded, the present series of inferences." 



Recalling now the various evidences educed by Wyman, Giman, 

 and others, regarding the anomalous characters of the remains of 

 primitive man, it seems impossible that a mind unbiased by precon- 

 ceived opinion should be able to resist the conviction as to man's 

 lowly origin. 



If we take into account the rapidly-accumulating data of European 

 naturalists concerning primitive man, with the mass of evidence re- 

 ceived in these notes, we find an array of facts which irresistibly 

 point to a common origin with animals directly below us, and these 

 evidences are found in the massive skulls with coarse ridges for mus- 

 cular attachments, the rounding of the base of the nostrils, the early 

 ossification of the nasal bones, the small cranial capacity in certain 

 forms, the prominence of the frontal crest, the posterior position of 



