THE ORIGIN OF MAN 127 



in no way surprising when one regards the findings of biologists 

 and zoologists in their examination of phylogenies in other 

 parts of the scale of life. But nevertheless such a finding is 

 a serious one. Not only does it entail the belief that the 

 origin of the human race is to be sought at the base and not 

 at the apex of the Primate series, but it entails the belief that 

 Man has, after his apprenticeship of arboreal uprightness, 

 stood upright upon his specialised feet for a very long period 

 of history. Such a belief would necessitate our imagining that 

 in a very remote past ancestral Man became a more or less 

 distinct creature which might be termed zoologically a 

 "ground -ape " a phase which the gorilla (already too far 

 gone in simian specialisation) in part assumes to-day. 



But from such speculations we are suddenly recalled to 

 reality, for such speculations obviously permit an inference 

 that an animal one might term semi-human might possibly 

 be an extremely ancient animal that a " missing link " 

 might be, as Hubrecht indeed pictured it, an extremely 

 ancient, small ground-ape not far removed from Tarsius, and 

 no slouching product, half chimpanzee and half Man, of 

 comparatively recent evolution. From that belief of Hubrecht 

 I find it difficult to withhold sympathy. Man retains so many 

 traces of mammalian simplicity, his body is so compounded 

 of the most primitive mammalian features, that it is difficult 

 to picture him as anything other than an extremely primitive 

 mammal committed to a line of evolution which consisted 

 almost entirely in the general and overwhelming development 

 of the brain. So many of the primitive features which 

 astonish us in Man are not possessed by the anthropoid apes 

 that it is difficult to believe that Man could have arisen 

 from any type at all similar to those living to-day ; and as 

 for the Old World monkeys, they are so definitely specialised 

 in their own direction that they can in no wise be regarded 

 as ancestral forms of Homo. 



Having arrived at such a conclusion it remains to inquire 

 if any known facts support the idea that Man, as a distinct 

 zoological type, might have the astonishing antiquity demanded 

 by such a picture of his phylogeny. 



