65 



existed, although none of their remains have 

 been, not indeed preserved for of this we 

 know nothing but discovered. Spencer's con 

 clusion, already quoted, that " the facts about 

 fossil remains are so fragmentary that no posi 

 tive conclusion can be drawn from them," 

 seems to us to be the only sane one in the field 

 of paleontology. But in Father Wasmann's 

 mouth this argument has a character of incon 

 sistency peculiarly its own. For in his argu 

 ment against an ape ancestry of man he draws 

 from similar premises a directly opposite con 

 clusion from that which here "he is forced" to 

 accept. His argument in one case is ; the 

 Termites have no ancestors of their own ; there 

 fore they must be descendants of the ants of 

 the Baltic tertiary ; while in the case of man 

 his argument against Haeckel and monism is : 

 Man has no ancestor therefore he is not des 

 cended from the ape, but from some ancestor 

 unknown. But supposing a thorough-going 

 monist like Ernest Haeckel should undertake 

 to apply his "ant" argument to man and say : 

 We find fossil apes and prosimiae in abundance, 

 but nowhere do we find fossil human species, 



