336 THE CASE AGAINST EVOLUTION 



Spain. In fact, to the unprejudiced mind the Neanderthal 

 type conveys the impression of a race on the downward path 

 of degeneration rather than an embodiment of the promise 

 of better things. 'There is another view," says Dwight, 

 ". . . though it is so at variance with the Zeitgeist that little 

 is heard of it. May it not be that many low forms of man, 

 archaic as well as contemporary, are degenerate races? We 

 are told everything about progress; but decline is put aside. 

 It is impossible to construct a tolerable scheme of ascent 

 among the races of man; but cannot dark points be made 

 light by this theory of degeneration? One of the most obscure, 

 and to me most attractive of questions, is the wiping out of 

 old civilizations. That it has occurred repeatedly, and on 

 very extensive scales, is as certain as any fact in history. 

 Why is it not reasonable to believe that bodily degeneration 

 took place in those fallen from a higher estate, who, half- 

 starved and degraded, returned to savagery? Moreover, the 

 workings of the soul would be hampered by a degenerating 

 brain. For my part I believe the Neanderthal man to be a 

 specimen of a race, not arrested in its upward climb, but 

 thrown down from a higher position." {Op. cit., pp. 169, 170.) 

 The view, however, that the Neanderthaloid type had de- 

 generated from a previous higher human type was not at all 

 in accord with the then prevalent opinion that this type was 

 far more ancient than any other. And Dwight himself ad- 

 mitted the force of the "objection . . . that the Neanderthal 

 race was an excessively old one and that skeletons of the 

 higher race which, according to the view which I have offered, 

 must have existed at the same time as the degenerate ones, 

 are still to be discovered." {Op. cit., p. 170.) In fact, the 

 Neanderthal ancestry of the present human race was so gen- 

 erally accepted that, in the very year in which Dwight's 

 book appeared, Sir Arthur Keith declared: "The Neanderthal 

 type represents the stock from which all modern races have 

 arisen." Time, however, as Dr. James Walsh remarked 

 {America, Dec. 15, 1917, pp. 230, 231), has triumphantly vin- 



