78 THE PROBLEM OF EVOLUTION 



Branco, who delivered a remarkably fine and 

 instructive lecture upon fossil man, at the fifth 

 International Zoological Congress at Berlin in 1901. 

 The chief points in this lecture are summed up in 

 the assertion that we know absolutely no ancestors 

 of the human race, for all fossil remains of human 

 beings are the remains of genuine men, such as 

 we are now. Branco at that time regarded the 

 Neandertal cranium and that of Spy as exceptions, 

 for such was the general opinion in 1901, but now 

 it is certain that these prehistoric crania belonged, 

 not to any ancestors of the human race, but to 

 an earlier variety of the human race. Therefore 

 Branco' s statement : ' We know no ancestors of 

 man,' is now still more true than it was in 1901. 



Allow me to read you a quotation from Pro- 

 fessor Schwalbe on the subject of primitive man. 

 He is well known amongst modern anthropologists 

 as one of the chief supporters of the theory that 

 man is descended from beasts, but he is a thorough 

 scientist. In the introduction to a work on the 

 primitive history of man (1904), in which he upholds 

 the descent of man from beasts, and connects the 

 Dryopithecus, etc., with the ancestors of man, he 

 says : ' In no department of natural science has 

 the attempt to draw general conclusions from an 

 aggregate of facts been so much influenced by the 

 subjective opinions of the individual scientist as 

 in the primitive history of mankind. On this 

 subject it has frequently happened that views, based 



