106 ANIMAL LIFE AND HUMAN PROGRESS 



can be no doubt ; they both belonged to the school which may 

 be termed " the school which saw no difficulties " ; and it is 

 against the uncritical acceptance of the teachings of this school 

 that I wish to raise a caution. I alluded to a purpose under- 

 lying the delivery of this lecture, and that purpose is to point 

 out to you the dangerously easy slide which opinion has made 

 after the extremely vigorous push administered in the past 

 half-century by Huxley and Haeckel. 



Haeckel divided the sequence of evolution into stages. In 

 the 21st stage evolution attained the status of the lemurs : in 

 the 22nd stage it had passed on to the New World monkeys : 

 in the 23rd the stage of the Old World monkeys was reached : 

 in the 24th the anthropoid apes had been developed. Pithe- 

 canthropus, the Javanese " missing link " of Dubois, unearthed 

 at Trinil, was the representative of the 25th stage, and Man 

 was easily attained in the 26th. To this simple declaration 

 Haeckel attached " absolute certainty," and to make his 

 position clear he represented the stages graphically as a linear 

 series of developmental steps ! That was an easy scheme 

 to grasp, an easy statement for the general public to swallow 

 whole, especially when it was backed by the weight of the 

 authority of a learned German professor. 



Huxley worked on rather different lines. He took a 

 dictum which was first enunciated by Buft'on, and was already 

 a hundred years old, and he elaborated it into a thesis 

 which took the published form of Man's Place in Nature. 

 This work exercised great influence, and is of the first im- 

 portance in any inquiry into the formation of our present 

 ideas concerning the origin of Man. Bufton had said of the 

 orang utan that " as regards his body, he differs less from 

 Man than he does from other Animals which are still called 

 Apes." Huxley took this as his thesis, and made it his creed. 

 Haeckel received this hundred-years-old dictum with acclaim, 

 and he termed it the " Huxley ean Law " or the " Pithecometra 

 thesis." Haeckel lived under the delusion that to give a 

 name to a process was to imply an understanding of the 

 process, and this name has acted as a talisman ever since. 



Huxlev was . a man of far more mental subtlety than 



