0$ ANTHROPOID APES TO MAtf. 307 



THE EVOLUTION OF MAN. 



PROF. COPE, in the course of an article entitled " What American 

 Paleontology has done for the Doctrine of Evolution" (Analostan 

 Magazine, Jan., 1891), says: "But Phenacodus had ancestors. In 

 a formation (the Puerco) still older than that in which its remains 

 occur, is found another genus where the general characters are like 

 those of Phenacodus, but in which the premolar teeth are still sim- 

 pler (genus Protogonia). We may now look about us and see what 

 other affinities are displayed by this member of the Phenacodon- 

 tidse. The dentition is not to be distinguished in general characters 

 from that of the ancestors of the Lemurs. The feet, including the 

 end phalanges, are quite the same in Phenacodus, and presumedly 

 in Protogonia, and in the significant region of the palm and sole of 

 the feet the identity is exact. Now, these ancestral Lemurs (Ada- 

 pidce) can be traced directly to the Lemuridse, many of which still 

 exist in Madagascar, and these in turn were long ago regarded with 

 good reason by Haeckel as the ancestors of the monkeys. These 

 are, by way of some extinct anthropoid apes, the ancestors of man. 

 So we have in the Phenacodontidae the ancestors of man as well as 

 of all hoofed mammalia." 



BACTERIUM AND ANIMALCULA. 



ALL natural earth and most waters swarm with minute organ- 

 isms called bacteria and cocci. The last set up fermentative pro- 

 cesses; the first those called putrefactive. Popular imagination 

 attaches to these creatures unpleasant ideas, and yet they are the 

 essential processes of nature, in perpetual progress everywhere and 

 at all times, nowhere more active than in our own bodies, and with- 

 out which all life, animal and vegetable, must come to an instant 

 stop. The plant cannot assimilate nitrogen save as this is prepared 

 for it by the bacterium. Human imagination ascribes to the word 

 burning an idea of violent destruction and pain. Yet knowledge 

 has long familiarized the notion of animal respiration as one of slow 

 burning. The existence of heat in the animal body is ascribed to 

 changes in its tissues not unlike those the same tissues undergo in 

 cremation, only slower. The present state of knowledge has taught 

 that in the nutritive scheme the changes expressed as putrefactive 

 and fermentative have an essential place. 



All productive soil swarms with bacteria. All rivers, lakes, and 

 creeks contain them in myriads. But for them these waters could 



