THE UNIQUE MAMMAL 3 



where Linnaeus did in his classification. Nor has anyone doubted 

 that his closest biological affinities were with the other infra- 

 human Primates. Nor, considering the important part that 

 vanity plays in human nature, is it likely that man's pinnacled 

 position ever will be questioned by himself, even if it were not 

 the fact that the scientific reasons for classifying him as Linnaeus 

 did are inherently sound and convincing. 



While everyone agrees that man's closest living relatives are 

 found in the four men-like apes, gorilla, chimpanzee, orang, and 

 gibbon, there is no such agreement about the precise structure 

 of his ancestral pedigree. The evidence that he had a perfectly 

 natural and normal one, and was not specially created to meet 

 a felt need for university professors and bartenders, is over- 

 whelming in magnitude and cogency. But exactly what the 

 individual steps were, or how they came about, is still to be 

 learned. There are nearly as many theories on the point as 

 there are serious students of the problem. All of them at 

 present, however, lack that kind of clear and simple proof which 

 brings the sort of universal acceptance that is accorded the Law 

 of Gravitation, for example. Only on one point, and that one a 

 little vague, can there be said to be general agreement. It is that, 

 on the weight of the evidence, it is probable that at some remote 

 period in the past for which no clear paleontological record 

 has yet been uncovered, man and the other Primates branched 

 off from what had theretofore been a common ancestral stem. 

 The doubt is about when, where, and how this branching took 

 place. Personally I am of the opinion that the conclusions 

 reached by Dr. Adolph H. Schultz, one of the most distin- 

 guished and widely experienced students of the problem, are 

 on the whole most closely in accord with all the known evidence. 

 These conclusions, in brief, are that the earliest branch to come 

 off from the common anthropoid stem was the one represented 

 by the existing Hylobatidae (gibbons and siamangs) j that 

 shortly after this branch had separated another independent 

 branch came off the common stem and ultimately developed 

 man as we now know him j that at a considerable time after this 



