LEADING ARGUMENTS FOR DESCENT 177 



stroy Christianity forever from the face of the 

 earth. To this end he shamelessly falsified science 

 and filled the gaps in man's ancestry with beings 

 his own imagination had created and which he 

 named, "primitive gastraeadae, primitive amni- 

 otes, primitive promammals, primitive marsupi- 

 als," etc. For a time this deception succeeded to 

 such an extent as to become a popular creed, an 

 application to man of what is known as the bio- 

 genetic law. 



It is no longer necessary to disprove Haeckel's 

 biogenetic law, though this for a time was the 

 gospel of supposed science in our schools and uni-i 

 versities and still continued to remain part of the 

 gospel of Socialism, and, unfortunately, of a large 

 number of sociologists. On this subject Menge 

 says : 



Professor Haeckel's theory that man passes through the same 

 stages as did the race, that is, first becomes a fish, then goes 

 on through the other forms, until he shows in his embryonic de- 

 velopment every form through which his ancestors have passed, 

 is a theory which Professor Kellogg well says is now only a 

 skeleton on which to hang exceptions. It has also been since 

 said by another bio/ogist that there is a great want of logic in 

 saying that because a human being passes through a similar 

 stage as does the fish, that therefore the human must have been 

 a fish once upon a time, when all that should be said is that 

 the human and the fish pass through the same stage. 1 



The reason for honoring the human race by 

 placing the fish among its early progenitors was 

 the gill-like and fin-like appearance of a certain 



1 "The Beginnings of Science," p. 148. 



