Chapter III 



THE ANIMAL ANCESTRY OF MAN 



William K. Gregory 



"know thyself" 



THE almost hopeless egocentrism of man, his deep 

 prejudices and his aversion to his "poor relations," 

 the apes and monkeys, make it extremely difficult to 

 secure complete and ungrudging acceptance of the con- 

 sequences of man's status as a regular member of the order 

 of Primates. To this day the discovery of man's place in 

 Nature, as recognized for instance by Linnaeus in 1759 

 and confirmed since then by thousands of separate items of 

 proof, remains virtually unknown to the masses of the 

 "educated" and, with some exceptions, is commonly 

 ignored by college presidents. Even the word Primates, 

 except as apphed to certain ecclesiastics, is not to be found 

 among the seventy thousand common Engfish words fisted 

 in a recent abridged edition of Webster's dictionary. Yet 

 a good part of what man is now, even many of his parasites, 

 diseases and structural weaknesses, to say nothing of his 

 mental characteristics, come to him by way of his primate 

 ancestors. When we give up the traditional method of the 

 ostrich in deafing with such unsavory facts, our eyes will 

 be open to the wholesomeness of the fruit of the tree of 

 knowledge. 



It is therefore the object of the present chapter to indicate 

 a few of the multitudinous ways in which man's animal 

 ancestry conditions his present biological status, to trace 

 the main stages of his "ascent to Parnassus," and at the 

 same time to show our obligation to our lowly predecessors, 

 each of which did his share in testing, rejecting or trans- 

 mitting the innumerable "basic patents," or natural adjust- 

 ments, that have proved requisite for our survival in a world 

 of inexorable competitive' tests. 



The general reader may ask why in the following pages 

 we speak so confidently of the "sequence from fish to man," 



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