344 E VOL UTION A ND D OGMA . 



but "a pentadactylic, plantigrade bunadont," and is 

 genetically connected with the lemuroid, phenacodus 

 and the anaptomorphus homunculus, both of which 

 flourished in the early Tertiary Period. Haeckel 

 goes further back and discerns in the skull-less, brain- 

 less and memberless amphioxus, an animal which 

 we should regard with special veneration "as being 

 of our own flesh and blood," and as being the only 

 one of all extant animals which " can enable us to 

 form an approximate conception of our earliest 

 vertebrate ancestors." 



All these imaginings, however, are, as Virchow 

 truly observes, but dreams, hypotheses more or less 

 extravagant, which have secured for their origina- 

 tors a certain amount of temporary notoriety, but 

 which have no foundation whatsoever in any fact or 

 legitimate induction of science. 1 



But if the fact of the animal origin of man has 

 not been established, if there is no likelihood that it 

 will be established, at least in the immediate future, 

 even according to the testimony of those who are 

 most desirous of seeing the pithecoid ancestry of 

 man demonstrated, what is to be said of the opinions 

 of those who, nevertheless, maintain the animal origin 

 of man, if not as a fact, at least as a tenable opin- 

 ion ? Is such an opinion compatible with Dogma, 

 and can a consistent Catholic assent to any of the 



1 In his admirable study, "Apes and Man," St. George Miv- 

 art, a pronounced evolutionist, gives, in a few words, the verdict 

 of comparative anatomy respecting the simian origin of man. 

 He says, p. 172 : " It is manifest that man, the apes and half- 

 apes, cannot be arranged in a single ascending series of which 

 man is the term and culmination." 



