A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



and the known Homo neanderthalensis, and, lastly, 

 proud Homo sapiens himself have descended. Thus 

 Professor Haeckel is able to make the affirmation, as 

 he did recently before the International Zoological 

 Congress in Cambridge, that man's line of descent is 

 now clearly traced, from a stage back in the Eocene 

 time when our ancestor was not yet more than half 

 arrived to the ape's estate, down to the time of true 

 human development. "There no longer exists," he 

 says, "a 'missing link.' The phyletic continuity of 

 the primate stem, from the oldest lemurs down to 

 man himself, is an historical fact." 



It should, perhaps, be added that the force of this 

 rather startling conclusion rests by no means exclu- 

 sively upon the rinding of pithecanthropus and the other 

 fossils, nor indeed upon any paleontological evidence 

 whatever. These, of course, furnish data of a very 

 tangible and convincing kind; but the evidence in its 

 totality includes also a host of data from the realms of 

 embryology and comparative anatomy data which, 

 as already suggested, enabled Professor Haeckel to 

 predicate the existence of pithecanthropus long in ad- 

 vance of his actual discovery. Whether the more re- 

 mote gaps in the chain of man's ancestry will be bridged 

 in a manner similarly in accord with Professor Haeckel's 

 predications, it remains for future discoveries of zoolo- 

 gist and paleontologist to determine. In any event, 

 the recent findings have added an increment of glory to 

 that philosophical zoology of which Professor Haeckel 

 is the greatest living exponent. 



This tracing of genealogies is doubtless the most 

 spectacular feature of the new zoology, yet it must be 



176 



