July 28, 1922] 



SCIENCE 



95 



evolution is perhaps the most momentous in its 

 bearings of all the great generalizations which 

 have come with increased knowledge of the 

 globe's history and the history of its inhab- 

 itants. Those who will take the trouble to con- 

 sider even in the most elementary manner the 

 multifold and concurrent evidence of the suc- 

 cessive appearance of vegetable and animal 

 species on the earth and the reasons for in- 

 cluding man among the primates, can not fail, 

 unless they be utterly blinded by prejudice, 

 freely to concede the animalhood of man. The 

 matter has been set forth by skillful writers 

 such as Huxley, Wallace, Haeckel, John Fiske, 

 Drummond and many others in a manner so 

 plain and convincing that it would seem that no 

 one would have the slightest inclination to take 

 issue with them on the general proposition. 

 But to judge from the conscious and uncon- 

 scious confusion that seems to prevail in the 

 minds of many the matter is still very ill- 

 understood by even intelligent laymen. 



Recently a serious misunderstanding has re- 

 sulted from the report that men of science are 

 giving up "Darwinism," that "Darwinism is 

 dead." This has puzzled those who supposed 

 that evolution was a well substantiated assump- 

 tion, and has tilled with a somewhat malicious 

 joy those who have always denounced the no- 

 tion as wicked and opposed to Scripture. To 

 the public, Darwinism means evolution, man's 

 monkey origin, as the matter is popularly but 

 inexactly phrased. But to the paleontologist 

 and biologist Darwinism does not mean the 

 theory of man's animal descent, which was 

 formulated long before the publication of the 

 Origin of Species, but is confined to the in- 

 genious theories which Darwin so patiently 

 worked out to account for the facts of evolu- 

 tion. The statement that Darwinism is dead 

 does not mean that the evidence for the evolu- 

 tionary hypothesis has in any way been weak- 

 ened or that any really competent man of sci- 

 ence doubts our animal derivation. It only 

 means that Darwin's explanations of how one 

 species may have been derived from another 

 have proved, as a result of increasing knowl- 

 edge, to be mistaken or wholly inadequate. It 

 means that we can not any longer assign the 

 importance he did to sexual and natural selec- 



tion and the hereditary transmissibility of ac- 

 quired characters. But the confessed failure so 

 far of biologists to clear up the process of evo- 

 lution, or experimentally create a new species 

 from an existing one, does not affect the facts 

 derived from many converging sources which 

 lead to the unavoidable conclusion that man 

 has a genealogical relation to the higher ani- 

 mals. 



It is the extraordinarily illuminating dis- 

 covery of man's animalhood rather than evolu- 

 tion in general that troubles the routine mind. 

 Many are willing to admit that it looks as if 

 life had developed on the earth slowly, in suc- 

 cessive stages ; this they can regard as a merely 

 curious fact and of no great moment if only 

 man can be defended as an honorable exception. 

 The fact that we have an animal body may 

 also be conceded, but surely man must have a 

 soul and a mind altogether distinctive and 

 unique from the very beginning, bestowed upon 

 him by the Creator and setting him off an 

 immeasurable distance from any mere animal. 

 But whatever may be the religious and poetic 

 significance of this compromise it is becoming 

 less and less tenable as a scientific and historic 

 truth. The facts indicate that man's mind is 

 quite as clearly of animal extraction as his 

 body. Those older observations which are 

 classed under paleontology, zoology, compara- 

 tive anatomy, bio-chemistry, physiology and 

 embryology, which reveal innumerable con- 

 formities and affinities between man and the 

 higher mammals in structure, function and de- 

 velopment from the egg, are now being par- 

 allelled by observations, classed under com- 

 parative psychology, functional psychology, 

 anthropology, prehistoric archeology and intel- 

 lectual history, which show that man's mind 

 like his body is akin in its nature and funda- 

 mental operations to that of the higher animals. 



The historical and comparative methods of 

 approaching the study of the human body are 

 largely responsible, as you are all aware, for 

 our present rapidly growing understanding of 

 it. The historical and comparative study of 

 psychological phenomena — of what we call 

 reasoning, emotions, impulses, the will — prom- 

 ise to be quite as clarifying and revolutionary 

 when they can be freely applied. They will 



