466 ANTHROPOLOGY 



corresponding respectively to the white, black, brown, and yellow 

 "races" of mankind (leaving the red man, or Amerind, to be in- 

 terpreted perhaps as a migrated branch of the brown stock) ; others, 

 like Powell, find it easier to think of an indefinitely large number 

 of initial stocks and centres of development from a hypothetic 

 prototype to the "human form divine" a prototype represented 

 perhaps in a particular place by the famous fossil from Java, the 

 Pithecanthropes erectus of Dubois. The alternative hypothesis is 

 that of the monogenesis assumed in the early days of man-science; 

 and the choice or adjustment between these opposing views 

 is one of the most prominent among the present problems of an- 

 thropology. The great facts are (1) that all known lines of human 

 development are convergent forward, and hence divergent back- 

 ward, and (2) that all well-known lines of biotic (i. e., subhuman) 

 development are divergent forward; how these incongruous lines 

 are to be united across the dark chasm of that unknown time when 

 man became man, remains a question only made larger thus far 

 by each advance of knowledge. 



The Problem of Humanization 



To the comparative anatomist the gap between simian structure 

 and human structure was of little note, even before it was divided 

 by the Dubois discovery in Java ; for the differences between higher 

 apes and lower men are less than those between either (1) lower and 

 higher apes, or (2) lower and higher men. Yet to the sympathetic 

 student of mankind, these dead homologies are but unsatisfying 

 husks; the great fact remains that even the lowest savage known 

 to experience is human man in attitude, mien, habits, arid 

 intelligence, while even the highest apes are but bristly beasts. It 

 were bootless to deny or decry the chasm separating the always 

 human biped from the always beastly quadrumane, since it is the 

 broadest in the entire realm of nature as seen by those who appre- 

 ciate humanity in its fullness. How the chasm was crossed, either 

 in the one place and time required by monogenesis, or in the many 

 places and times demanded by polygenesis, is a question of such 

 moment as to rank among the great problems of anthropology until 

 (if ever) the solution is wrought. A tentative solution has indeed 

 been suggested in the modified form of mating which must have 

 attended the assumption of the erect attitude; l yet final solution 

 awaits the future. 



1 The Trend of Human Progress, American Anthropologist, vol. i, p. 418, 1899. 



