THE LAST STAGES IN THE GENEALOGY OF MAN 821 



earth, is brought into active operation. Great rivers spring from 

 the melting fields of snow and ice that crown the mountain-sum- 

 mits, and, swollen by the copious condensation of rain on their 

 slopes, flow down to the plains below, which are fertilized by their 

 perennial waters. 



♦«» 



THE LAST STAGES IN THE GENEALOGY OF MAN.* 



By M. PAUL TOPINAED. 



OUR lectures hitherto have shown us that science has not yet 

 succeeded in casting a clear light on the exact connections 

 of the placental mammalia, and that it is still ignorant of the pre- 

 cise ways, direct or indirect, by which the present orders and fami- 

 lies have been derived. Haeckel's genealogy has been the point 

 of departure for numerous essays, which have rendered immense 

 services; but, as the author himself declares, it is only a first 

 sketch, and will have to be revised hereafter. It has been shown 

 by our lectures that the present orders, families, and genera are 

 the product of a long evolution and successive transformations, 

 and did not exist when the first placental mammalia appeared, 

 and when the first feebly determinative evolutionary movement 

 of differentiation and reduplication of types, which led to exist- 

 ing forms, was manifested in the marsupials. It is also shown 

 that the progressive passage from the marsuj)ial fauna of that 

 time to the existing fauna did not take place by a single series 

 of species for each order, family, or genus, but in all the cases in 

 which science is in possession of sufficient documents, by multiple 

 series, anastomosing, intercrossing one another, and often consti- 

 tuting an inextricable network. 



Here and there the advance seems to have been more direct, as 

 in the ungulates, the carnivores, the cheiropteres, and the pinni- 

 peds or aquatic carnivora, while in other orders, such as the in- 

 sectivora and the rodents, it seems to have been in an exceedingly 

 complicated way. That branch which, according to Haeckel, 

 leads to man, is the one that interests us most. Let us consider, 

 then, the station which succeeds that of the marsupials, the eight- 

 eenth from the moneres in Haeckel's genealogy, the lemurs. 



The lemurs have been ranked among the quadrumana by Geof- 

 froy Saint-Hilaire, Cuvier, De Blainville, Duvernoy and Milne- 

 Edwards — that is, separated from man ; and among the primates, 

 or in the same order with man, by Linnseus, Lesson, Huxley, and 

 Broca. Yogt and Haeckel call them prosimians, the Germans 

 half -apes, and the French sometimes false apes. The dominant 

 question in our investigation is, therefore, where they belong: 



* From a lecture at the Ecole d? Anthropologle, March 21, 1888. 



