446 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 192 8 



fitimulus to investigation, and that the things most needed now are 

 more fossils and many of them.^ While awaiting these further dis- 

 coveries we should not hesitate to confess that in place of demon- 

 strable links between man and otlier mammals we now possess 

 nothing more than some fossils so fragmentary that they are sus- 

 ceptible of being interpreted either as such links or as something 

 el^e. Superficial or prejudiced readers might regard this confession 

 as having an important bearing on the subject of organic evolution 

 in general and of man's origin in particular ; but no conclusion could 

 be more unjustified. The idea that all existing plants and animals 

 are derived through some process of orderly change from kinds 

 now extinct is supported by an array of facts too great and too well 

 established to be weakened by doubts ca^t on alleged family records 

 of any one creature. To understand how true this is we can, perhaps, 

 do nothing more enlightening than to reread and meditate upon the 

 second paragraph of the General Summary and Conclusion of 

 Darwin's Descent of Man, a passage which, because of the footnotes 

 that subsequent research has added to it, i,s even more full of meaning 

 to-day then it was when first published 58 years ago : 



The main conclusion arrived at in this work, and now held hy many 

 naturalists who are well competent to form a sound judgment, is that man 

 is descended from some less highly organized form. The grounds upon which 

 this conclusion rests will never be shaken, for the close similarity between 

 man and the lower animals in embryonic development, as well as in innumerable 

 points of structure and constitution, both of high and of the most trifling 

 importance — the rudiments which he retains and the abnormal reversions to 

 which he is occasionally liable — are facts which can not be disputed. They 

 have long been known, but until recently they told us nothing with respect 

 To the origin of man. Now, when viewed by the light of our knowledge of 

 the whole organic world, their meaning is unmistakable. The great principle 

 of evolution stands up clear and firm when these groups of facts are con- 

 sidered in connection with others, such as the mutual afiinities of the members 

 of the same group, their geographical distribution in past and present times, 

 and their geological succession. It is incredible that all these facts should 

 speak falsely. He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena 

 of nature as disconnected, can not any longer believe that man is the work 

 of a separate act of creation. He will be forced to admit that the close 

 resemblance of the embryo of man to that, for instance, of a dog — the con- 

 struction of his skull, limbs, and whole frame, independently of the uses to 

 which the parts may be put, on the same plan with that of other mammals^ — 

 the occasional reappearance of various structures, for instance, of several 

 distinct muscles, which man does not normally possess, but which are common 

 to the quadrumana — and a crowd of analogous facts — all point in the plainest 

 manner to the conclusion that man is the codescendent with other mammals 

 of a common progenitor. 



^ La solution du probl^me de nos origines et surtout la determination precise de notre 

 lignfie exigent de nouvelles dScouvertes de fossiles, de nombreux fossiles! (Boule.) 



