132 "The Descent of Man" 



life ; he even believes that in his Tetraprothomo, represented by a 

 femur, he has discovered a direct ancestor of man. Lehmann-Nitsche 

 is working at the other side of the gulf between apes and men, and 

 he describes a remarkable first cervical vertebra (atlas) from Monte 

 Hermoso as belonging to a form which may bear the same relation 

 to Homo sapiens in South America as Homo primigmius does in 

 the Old World. After a minute investigation he establishes a human 

 species Homo neogaeus, while Ameghino ascribes this atlas vertebra 

 to his Tetraprothomo. 



Thus throughout the whole scientific world there is arising a 

 new life, an eager endeavour to get nearer to Huxley's problema 

 maximum, to penetrate more deeply into the origin of the human 

 race. There are to-day very few experts in anatomy and zoology 

 who deny the animal descent of man in general. Religious con- 

 siderations, old prejudices, the reluctance to accept man, who so far 

 surpasses mentally all other creatures, as descended from " soulless " 

 animals, prevent a few investigators from giving full adherence to 

 the doctrine. But there are very few of these who still postulate 

 a special act of creation for man. Although the majority of experts 

 in anatomy and zoology accept unconditionally the descent of man 

 from lower forms, there is much diversity of opinion among them in 

 regard to the special line of descent. 



In trying to establish any special hypothesis of descent, whether 

 by the graphic method of drawing up genealogical trees or otherwise, 

 let us always bear in mind Darwin's words 1 and use them as a critical 

 guiding line : " As we have no record of the lines of descent, the 

 pedigree can be discovered only by observing the degrees of re- 

 semblance between the beings which are to be classed." Darwin 

 carries this further by stating "that resemblances in several 

 unimportant structures, in useless and rudimentary organs, or 

 not now functionally active, or in an embryological condition, are 

 by far the most serviceable for classification 2 ." It has also to be 

 remembered that numerous separate points of agreement are of 

 much greater importance than the amount of similarity or dis- 

 similarity in a few points. 



The hypotheses as to descent current at the present day may be 

 divided into two main groups. The first group seeks for the roots 

 of the human race not among any of the families of the apes — the 

 anatomically nearest forms — nor among their very similar but less 

 specialised ancestral forms, the fossil representatives of which 

 we can know only in part, but, setting the monkeys on one side, 

 it seeks for them lower down among the fossil Eocene Pseudo- 

 lemuridae or Lemuridae (Cope), or even among the primitive 



1 Descent of Man, p. 229. 2 Loc. cit. 



