AND THE APE THEORY. 37 



Selachians, would have yielded them more fruit and 

 have given them more light than long years of 

 describing and measuring human skulls, however 

 various. 



Virchow himself affords the most striking example 

 of the usual results of this so-called " exact method " 

 of studying skulls. In his popular essay on " The 

 Skulls of Men and Apes," 1870, he concludes with 

 this notable proposition : " It is therefore self-evident 

 that Man can never by any progressive development 

 have originated from the Apes." Every evolutionist 

 who is familiar with the surprising facts of compara- 

 tive morphology will draw from them the opposite 

 conclusion : " It is self-evident that Man could only 

 have originated from the progressive development of 

 the Ape (organism)." 



This brings us to that question which, in the 

 .popular treatment of the theory of descent, is justly 

 considered as its most important outcome and as the 

 keystone of the evolutionist edifice to the well- 

 known proposition, " Man is descended from the Ape." 

 While we simply ignore all the misrepresentation, 

 distortion, and misinterpretation which this ape, or 

 pithecoid hypothesis, has met with on all sides, we 

 will only remark that this fundamental proposition, in 

 the sense of our modern doctrine of evolution, can 

 rationally have only this plain meaning : that the 



