4 ARBOREAL MAN 



accounting for change in the living world. Change comes 

 about in some way that is obvious; by what channel or 

 channels it comes about concerns the present inquiry 

 but little. How it is transmitted once it came into being, 

 how it is accumulated, perfected, and handed on are 

 questions which, despite an enormous amount of work, 

 and despite an accumulated literature of dogmatic, and 

 sometimes unjustified assertion, are at present unknown. 

 Without touching upon these problems it is proposed to 

 examine the probable path by which the Primates and 

 Man have originated, reviewing the influences that have 

 probably reacted upon them, but leaving aside the ques- 

 tions as to how changes have come into being, and how 

 such changes have been inherited. We will therefore 

 define our position by saying that change has been 

 effected somehow, and somehow it has been handed on ; 

 and that any attempt to chronicle the progress of these 

 changes need not be branded as Lamarckian or impossible, 

 as Darwinian or improbable, as mutationist or orthodox, 

 unless definite assertions are made as to the exact mode 

 or means by which these alterations have come into being, 

 or have become handed on and stereotyped. 



Man has often been discussed as an evolutionary pro- 

 duct ; the literature of the last fifty years teems with works 

 upon that special aspect of anthropology which deals with 

 Man as the highest of the Primates. There is nothing to be 

 added to the brilliant generalizations of Huxley, nothing 

 to be altered in the careful analysis of primate and human 

 characters carried out by Keith. One reason only has 

 appealed to the writer as an excuse for the publication of 

 these lectures, and that is the fact that the paleonto- 

 logical history of Man is rapidly enlarging. Any new 

 find of a so-called " missing link " may bring us by chance 

 nearer to deciding in what type human divergence first 

 manifested itself. Disputes concerning the zoological 

 rank of such finds will, in all probability, be carried on 

 with extreme vigour for many years to come. That is 



