28 DARWINISM AND HUMAN LIFE 



(VI) The Descent and Ascent of Man. — 

 What do we owe to Darwin ? A recognition of 

 man's solidarity witli the rest of creation, of his 

 affiliation to a Simian stock. In the cumulative 

 argument of the " Descent of Man," Darwin 

 disclosed the rock whence he was hewn and the 

 pit whence he was digged, showing, not exactly 

 that " man sprang from a monkey," as the vulgar 

 idea is, but that man and anthropoid apes are 

 collateral branches from a common Primate stock 

 which remains hidden in obscurity. 



Darwin gave details of the all-pervading simi- 

 litude of structure between man and the anthropoid 

 apes, to which the researches of recent years 

 have added such striking items as a sameness 

 in blood-reaction to Friedenthal's test. He showed 

 how we carry about with us a museum of relics 

 indicative of our ancestry — a museum whose 

 catalogue now amounts, according to Wiedersheim, 

 to about a hundred items. The anatomical re- 

 semblances between adult man and adult apes 

 are associated with even closer resemblances in 

 the embryos, and gain additional significance 

 when we take into account the scanty skeletal 

 remains of primitive man, the lower races of 

 men, and the occurrence of almost sub-human 

 types occasionally born in times of distress. 

 The affiliation applies to mind as well as 

 body, for there is an ever-growing mass of 



tions) from changes imposed from without (extrinsic modifications).. 

 Young stages of a language show embryonic features, just aa 

 languages that have been evolving for centuries show vestigial 

 structures, such as the familiar unsoimded letters in words. There 

 are fossil languages; just as there are fossil species. Both in 

 languages and in species we can recognise the operation of selective 

 processes and the efiect of isolation. 



