CHAPTER V. 

 THE HISTOEY OF OUK SPECIES. 



Origin of man. Mythical history of creation. Moses and Linne. 

 The creation of permanent species. The catastrophic theory : 

 Cuvier. Transformism : Goethe. Theory of descent : Lamarck. 

 Theory of selection: Darwin. Evolution (phylogeny). Ances- 

 tral trees. General morphology. Natural history of creation. 

 Systematic phylogeny. Fundamental law of biogeny. Anthro- 

 pogeny. Descent of man from the ape. Pithecoid theory. 

 The fossil pithecanthropus of Dubois. 



The youngest of the great branches of the living tree 

 of biology is the science we call biological evolution or 

 phylogeny. It came into existence much later, and 

 under much more difficult circumstances, than its 

 natural sister, embryonic evolution or ontogeny. The 

 object of the latter was to attain a knowledge of the 

 mysterious processes by which the individual organism, 

 plant or animal, developed from the egg. Phylogeny 

 has to answer the much more obscure and difficult 

 question: "What is the origin of the different 

 organic species of plants and animals?" 



Ontogeny (embryology and metamorphism) could 

 follow the empirical method of direct observation in 

 the solution of its not remote problem ; it needed but 

 to follow, day by day and hour by hour, the visible 

 changes which the foetus experiences during a brief 

 period in the course of its development from the 

 ovum. Much more difficult was the remote problem 



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