132 “The Descent of Man” 
life ; he even believes that in his T’etraprothomo, represented by a 
femur, he has discovered a direct ancestor of man. Lehmann-Nitsche 
is working at the other side of the gulf between apes and men, and 
he describes a remarkable first cervical vertebra (atlas) from Monte 
Hermoso as belonging to a form which may bear the same relation 
to Homo sapiens in South America as Homo primigenius does in 
the Old World. After a minute investigation he establishes a human 
species Homo neogaeus, while Ameghino ascribes this atlas vertebra 
to his Tetraprothomo. 
Thus throughout the whole scientific world there is arising a 
new life, an eager endeavour to get nearer to Huxley’s problema 
maximum, to penetrate more deeply into the origin of the human 
race. There are to-day very few experts in anatomy and zoology 
who deny the animal descent of. man in general. Religious con- 
siderations, old prejudices, the reluctance to accept man, who so far 
surpasses mentally all other creatures, as descended from “soulless” 
animals, prevent a few investigators from giving full adherence to 
the doctrine. But there are very few of these who still postulate 
a special act of creation for man. Although the majority of experts 
in anatomy and zoology accept unconditionally the descent of man 
from lower forms, there is much diversity of opinion among them in 
regard to the special line of descent. 
In trying to establish any special hypothesis of descent, whether 
by the graphic method of drawing up genealogical trees or otherwise, 
let us always bear in mind Darwin’s words! and use them as a critical 
guiding lme: “As we have no record of the lines of descent, the 
pedigree can be discovered only by observing the degrees of re- 
semblance between the beings which are to be classed.” Darwin 
carries this further by stating “that resemblances in several 
unimportant structures, in useless and rudimentary organs, or 
not now functionally active, or in an embryological condition, are 
by far the most serviceable for classification” It has also to be 
remembered that numerous separate points of agreement are of 
much greater importance than the amount of similarity or dis- 
similarity in a few points. « 
The hypotheses as to descent current at the present day may be 
divided into two main groups. The first group seeks for the roots 
of the human race not among any of the families of the apes—the 
anatomically nearest forms—nor among their very similar but less 
specialised ancestral forms, the fossil representatives of which 
we can know only in part, but, setting the monkeys on one side, 
it seeks for them lower down among the fossil Eocene Pseudo- 
lemuridae or Lemuridae (Cope), or even among the primitive 
1 Descent of Man, p. 229. 2 Loe. cit. 
