THE ANIMAL, MAN (ANTHROPOLOGY) 531 



The science of man is called Anthropology, and it might well claim 

 our attention for more than the space which it is possible to allot to 

 it in this book, for, as Professor Shaler (1841-1906) once wrote, "The 

 cry of what is man from the Hebrew singer has been re-echoed in all 

 ages and lands wherever men have attained the dignity of contem- 

 plation." 



The Process of Becoming Human 



No one knows the total duration of life upon the earth, not even 

 paleontologists, but evidences are unmistakable that millions of 

 years have elapsed since the dawn of life, when animals and plants 

 first appeared. It does not matter that the estimates of experts are 

 at great variance. The fact remains that an enormous stretch of 

 years was involved in the evolutionary preface to mankind. 



So far as is known, man emerged from the evolutionary welter only 

 about 500,000 years ago, although a long chain of events extending 

 over millions of years led up to his advent. Someone has estimated 

 that if a moving picture of the successive geological ages, in which 

 there is a known fossil record of life, could be speeded up and com- 

 pressed into a continuous show of fourteen hours beginning at 10 a.m., 

 man would appear first on the screen about five minutes before mid- 

 night. Such a picture would begin with simple unicellular organisms, 

 at first neither plant nor animal but gradually evolving into one or 

 the other, and followed eventually by a multitudinous host of proto- 

 zoans. These emerging, and later becoming diversified, would be 

 seen to foretell in miniature something of future possibilities by reason 

 of having worked out, even with a body made up of only a single cell, 

 varieties resembling superficially Lilliputian Hydras, worms, snails, 

 sea-urchins, crabs, and other higher forms of life. Since protozoans 

 in reproduction habitually produce twins by the process of fission, 

 the story continues with the rise of the long dynasty of the metazoans, 

 or multicellular forms, that developed when protozoan twins, like 

 "Siamese twins," got the habit of hanging together. 



Next follows the pattern of sponges, each a loosely aggregated mob 

 of individual cells, which, as time went on, in more complicated forms 

 higher up the scale, became organized and differentiated into orderly 

 tissues, thus making possible the development of organs. Then coe- 

 lenterates, lowly plantlike animals generally of sessile habit, grad- 

 ually became free-swimming and adventurous, while their radial type 

 of symmetry in consequence was in due time transformed into the 



