"MISSING LINKS" — MILLER 417 



the history of our planet man appears as a genuine Homo novus. It is possi- 

 ble, he says, to trace the ancestry of most of our present mammals among the 

 fossils of the Tertiary period, but man appears suddenly in the Quaternary 

 period, and has no Tertiary ancestors as far as we know. Human remains of 

 the Tertiary jieriod have not yet been discovered, and the traces of human 

 activity, which have been referred to that period, are of a vex-y doubtful 

 nature, but Diluvial remains abound. Man of the Diluvial epoch, however, 

 appears at once as a complete Homo sapiens. And further to the question, 

 "Who was the ancestor of man?" he replies, "Palaeontology tells us nothing 

 of the subject — it knows no ancestors of man." 



The same train of thought is carried on by Erich Wasmann, in his 

 Modern Biology and the Theory of Evolution. (Translated by A. 

 M. Buchanan from the third German edition; St. Louis, 1923.) 



What answer does palaeontology make to our question [with regard to the 

 ancestry of man]? She does not merely say "The missing link between man 

 and ape has not yet been discovered." . . . But palaeontology tells us far 

 more than this and, relying on the results of most recent investigations, she 

 ^ys J " We have the pedigree of the present apes, a pedigree very rich in 

 species and coming down from the hypothetical ancestral form of the oldest 

 Tertiary period to the present day. Zittel's " Grundzr.ge der Paliiontologie " 

 gives a list of no fewer than 30 genera of fossil Pro-simiae and 18 genera of 

 fossil apes, the remains of which are buried in the various strata from the 

 Lower Eocene to the close of the Alluvial epoch, but not one connecting link 

 has been found between their hypothetical ancestral form and man of the 

 present time. The u-JioIe hypothetical pedigree of man is not supported ty a 

 single fossil genus or a single fossil species." 



How extraordinary ! If man were really descended from a prehistoric ancestor, 

 common to him and to the apes of the present day, there must surely be some 

 fossil trace left of his branch of the genealogical tree and not only traces of 

 the branch leading to apes ! 



I should like to commend this scientific truth to the serious consideration of 

 all those who regard the descent of man from beasts as actually proved or who 

 hope that it will be actually proved in the near future. As a critical student of 

 nature, I am bound to express my fears that the upholders of this theory will 

 find themselves disappointed. 



Coming to thoroughgoing evolutionists, we find that many of them 

 believe that human missing links have been demonstrably discovered. 

 This opinion is set forth in no unfaltering words by Sir Arthur 

 Keith in his presidential address before the British Association for 

 the Advancement of Science given at Leeds, August 31, 1927.^ He 

 saj^s : 



We now know, that as Darwin sat in his study at Down, there lay hidden 

 at Piltdown, in Sussex, not 30 miles distant from him, sealed up in a bed 

 of gravel, a fossil human skull and jaw. In 1912, 30 years after Darwin's 

 death, Mr. Charles Dawson discovered this skull and my friend Sir Arthur 

 Smith Woodward described it, and rightly recognized that skull and jaw 

 were parts of the same individual and that this individual had lived, as was 

 determined by geological and other evidence, in the opening phase of the 



» Printed in Science, n. s. vol. 66, pp. 201-208, Sept. 2, 1927, and in Nature, vol. 120, 

 suppl., pp. 14-21, Sept. 3, 1927. 



