XII 



THE ORIGIN OF MAN 1 



MUCH important work has been done in the 

 elucidation of the most interesting inference from 

 the theory of organic evolution since the publica- 

 tion of Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, in 1863, 

 and Darwin's Descent of Man, in 1871. The most 

 important of the recent works on this subject have 

 issued from the Anthropological Laboratory of the 

 University of Cambridge, which can claim some 

 share in Darwin, and still more in Darwin's sons. 



The nearest animals to man are the chimpanzee, 

 gorilla, orang-outang, and gibbon the four kinds 

 of anthropoid ape. No amount of correction will 

 apparently destroy the popular error that man is 

 descended from one or other of these apes. This, 

 however, no biologist has suggested. What all 

 biologists believe, nevertheless, is that man and 

 certain of these apes have a common ancestor. 

 Both Darwin and Huxley thought the chimpanzee 

 and the gorilla to be the apes most nearly related 



1 Professor Haeckel's Anthropogenic, translated into English 

 as The Evolution of Man (Watts & Co., 1905) , is, despite the au- 

 thor's well-known peculiarities, the best work on this subject. 



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