A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



Now the discovery of this remarkable form did not 

 make Professor Haeckel any more certain that some 

 such form had existed than he was thirty years before 

 when he christened a hypothetical subject with the 

 title now taken by a tangible claimant. But, after all, 

 there is something very taking about a prophecy ful- 

 filled, and so the appearance of Pithecanthropus erectus 

 created no small sensation in the zoological world. He 

 was hailed by Haeckel and his followers as the veritable 

 "missing link," and as such gained immediate notori- 

 ety. But, on the other hand, a reactionary party at 

 once attacked him with the most bitter animadver- 

 sions, denouncing him as no true ancestor of man with 

 a bitterness that is hard to understand, considering 

 that the origin of man from some lower form has long 

 ceased to be matter of controversy. " Pithecanthropus 

 is at least half an ape," they cried, with the clear im- 

 plication of "anything but an ape for an ancestor!" 



I confess I have always found it hard to understand 

 just why this peculiar aversion should always be held 

 against the unoffending ape tribe. Why it would not 

 be quite as satisfactory to find one's ancestor in an ape 

 as in the alternative lines of, for example, the cow, or 

 the hippopotamus, or the whale, or the dog has always 

 been a mystery. Yet the fact of this prejudice holds. 

 Probably we dislike the ape because of the very patency 

 of his human affinities. The poor relation is objection- 

 able not so much because he is poor as because he is a 

 relation. So, perhaps, it is not the apeness, so to speak, 

 of the ape that is objectionable, but rather the human- 

 ness. In any event, the aversion has been matter of 

 common notoriety ever since the Darwinian theory 



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