LEADING ARGUMENTS FOR DESCENT 179 



because this action represents an atavistic rever- 

 sion to the time when they were crawling creatures 

 and played in the mud." 



The fact is that if anything were proved by the 

 discredited biogenetic law it would be that the ape 

 is rather descended from man, since among the 

 higher apes the young far more closely resemble 

 man in their cranial formation and their facial 

 similarities than the old. Whence it would ob- 

 viously follow, in conformity with the Haeckefian 

 law, that since the apes too must then be retracing 

 their race history they were formerly human 

 beings, that are now evolved into apes. This ar- 

 gument would be all the more conclusive in as far 

 as the cranial development of the human embryo 

 at no stage resembles that of the ape. 3 Surely 

 there is room here for Puck's exclamation : "What 

 fools these mortals be !" And yet over 300,000 

 copies of Haeckel's best known volume were sold 

 in Germany before the World War, and in 1906 

 German rationalists united into an Haeckelian 

 "Monist League," at Jena, the main object of 

 which was the dechristianization of the scientific 

 and public life of Germany. English and Ameri- 

 can universities had nothing better to do than 

 to repeat their absurd and intolerant materialistic 

 inconsequences. 



Sociologists, on their part, while generally most 

 positive when indulging in assertions based upon 

 Ibid., 302. 



