258 THE KIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE. 



abundantly the success that Lamarck had never seen, 

 with all his merit. His epoch-making work on The 

 Origin of Species by Natural Selection has transformed 

 modern biology from its very foundations, in the 

 course of the last forty years, and has raised it to a 

 stage of development that yields to no other science 

 in existence. Darwin is the Copernicus of the organic 

 world, as I said in 1868, and E. du Bois-Reymond 

 repeated fifteen years afterwards. 1 



IV. — MONISTIC ANTHROPOGENY. 



The fourth and last phase of the world's history 

 must be for us men that latest period of time which 

 has witnessed the development of our own race. 

 Lamarck (1809) had already recognised that this 

 evolution is only rationally conceivable as the outcome 

 of a natural process, by " descent from the apes," our 

 next of kin among the mammals. Huxley then 

 proved, in his famous essay on The Place of Man in 

 Nature, that this momentous thesis is an inevitable 

 consequence of the theory of descent, and is thoroughly 

 established by the facts of anatomy, embryology, and 

 palaeontology. He considered this "question of all 

 questions "to be substantially answered. Darwin 

 followed with a brilliant discussion of the question 

 under many aspects in his Descent of Man (1871). I 

 had myself devoted a special chapter to this important 

 problem of the science of evolution in my General 

 Morphology (1866). In 1874 I published my Anthro- 

 pogeny, which contains the first attempt to trace the 

 descent of man through the entire chain of his 



1 Cf. Monism, by E. Haeckel. 



