174 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



between tlie antliropomorplious apes and man, and defined tlie 

 point from which the descent probably began, adds that it does 

 not result that this descent follows a single way. There are sec- 

 ondary types among the human races, as there are among the 

 monkeys. By prolonging the parallel series of Gratiolet we get 

 the multiple stocks of man. " All the facts together, instead of 

 indicating to us a common stock, a single intermediate form be- 

 tween the monkey and man, point to numerous parallel series 

 which, more or less circumscribed, must have developed them- 

 selves from as many parallel series of apes" (p. 626). 



The second opinion appears less clearly defined than the first. 

 On the one side M. Vogt maintains his former ideas of polyge- 

 nistic simian descent, and on the other he reverses them by for- 

 mally denying that man is descended from the monkey. The 

 monkeys, he assumes, have always, as they were in the Miocene 

 and Pliocene ej)ochs, been cantoned in tropical climates. Essen- 

 tially tree-dwellers, they leap from branch to branch, and are 

 hardly ever displaced — not even those ground-living monkeys 

 that climb among the rocks. The separation between the monk- 

 eys of the Old and of the New Continents has always been com- 

 plete, there having been no communication between the two hemi- 

 spheres since the Eocene, or at least since the Miocene. Monkeys 

 not going into cold countries, they were effectually jDrevented 

 from approaching Bering Strait. They have, then, been but little 

 modified, especially in the Old Continent, where they are more 

 exclusively tree-dwelling. Higher types, like the laopithecus of 

 America and the dryopithecus of Europe, are met among them 

 after the Miocene, but they have undergone no further evolution 

 since. The fact of M. Gaudry's mesopithecus is the only one that 

 can be cited as in favor of any evolution. 



But M. Vogt speaks here of a tendency toward a superior 

 organization like that of man, of an approach by different ways, 

 the gorilla resembling man more in its limbs, the orang in its 

 brain, and the chimpanzee in its skull and teeth. " No fact," he 

 says, " permits us to assume a single only line of evolution toward 

 the human organization." Passing, then, more particularly to fos- 

 sil species, M. Vogt insists upon his proposition that " there has 

 been no evolution of the simian type through the geological ages," 

 and that " we can not point to any advance of this type since the 

 Upper Miocene." 



I see nothing leading to this conclusion. As I have just shown, 

 there are as many probabilities of an evolution among the apes as 

 in any other zoological group. No series of species, it is true, 

 leads positively from any ape to any man. But, in paleontology, 

 what are exhibited to us as series of species are usually only 

 series of characteristics. Comparative anthropology shows us a 



