XIV AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 



I presented all the essential and distinctive elements 

 of my monistic and genetic philosophy thirty-three 

 years ago, in my General Morphology of Organisms t a 

 large and laborious work, which has had but a limited 

 circulation. It was the first attempt to apply in 

 detail the newly-established theory of evolution to 

 the whole science of organic forms. In order to 

 secure the acceptance of at least one part of the new 

 thought which it contained, and to kindle a wider 

 interest in the greatest advancement of knowledge 

 that our century has witnessed, I published my 

 Natural History of Creation two years afterwards. 

 As this less complicated work, in spite of its great 

 defects, ran into nine large editions and twelve 

 different translations, it has contributed not a little 

 to the spread of monistic views. The same may be 

 said of the less known Anthropogeny 1 (1874), in which 

 I set myself the difficult task of rendering the most 

 important facts of the theory of man's descent 

 accessible and intelligible to the general reader ; the 

 fourth, enlarged, edition of that work appeared in 

 1891. In the paper which I read at the fourth 

 International Congress of Zoology at Cambridge, in 

 1898, on " Our Present Knowledge of the Descent of 

 Man " 2 (a seventh edition of which appeared in 1899), 

 I treated certain significant and particularly valuable 

 advances which this important branch of anthropology 



1 There are two English translations, The Evolution of Man (1879) 

 and The Pedigree of Man (1880). 



2 The English translation, by Dr. Hans Gadow, bears the title of 

 The Last Link. 



