GREAT STEPS IN ORGANIC EVOLUTION 397 



reproductive economy. With heightened individuation there 

 is associated lessened reproductivity. There are fewer off- 

 spring, which might be racially dangerous were there not 

 a correlated increase of parental care which implies less 

 juvenile mortality. If we read the story aright, the indi- 

 vidual counts increasingly, and psychical linkages bind par- 

 ents and offspring, and kin to kin. 



§ 9. The Ascent of Man. 



Finally, to bring our breathless survey to its climax, 

 there appeared in the Early Eocene age, perhaps three mil- 

 lion years ago, an arboreal race of mammals — the Primates 

 ■ — differentiated from other orders in digits and teeth, skull 

 and brain. From this stock there diverged New World 

 Monkeys and Old World Monkeys, small apes and large 

 apes, until at length there was left a much purified humanoid 

 stem, which after giving off some relative failures even- 

 tually realised itself in the modern man stock — '' the summit 

 of the whole ". 



§ 10. General Impressions of Animate Evolution, 



If we try to sink detail and seize the general impression, 

 the dominant one is that of the gradual increase of organi- 

 sation. This takes varied forms. There is a great deal of 

 structural complexity in organisms that is merely quantita- 

 tive, but there is a combination of differentiation and inte- 

 gration that is qualitative. The architecture of Venus's 

 Flower Basket (Euplectella) is very intricate, but it does 

 not amount to much more than the endless repetition of a 

 certain kind of scaffolding, where three flinty axes meet 

 at right angles and are firmly warped together where they 

 cross. But compare that kind of intricacy with man's cere- 



