VIII 
‘ 
CHARLES DARWIN AS AN ANTHROPOLOGIST 
By Ernst HAECKEL. 
Professor of Zoology in the University of Jena. 
THE great advance that anthropology has made in the second half of 
the nineteenth century is due, in the first place, to Darwin’s discovery 
of the origin of man. No other problem in the whole field of 
research is so momentous as that of “Man’s place in nature,” which 
was justly described by Huxley (1863) as the most fundamental of 
all questions. Yet the scientific solution of this problem was im- 
possible until the theory of descent had been established. 
It is now a hundred years since the great French biologist 
Jean Lamarck published his Philosophie Zoologique. By a re- 
markable coincidence the year in which that work was issued, 1809, 
was the year of the birth of his most distinguished successor, Charles 
Darwin. Lamarck had already recognised that the descent of man 
from a series of other Vertebrates—that is, from a series of Ape-like 
Primates—was essentially involved in the general theory of trans- 
formation which he had erected on a broad inductive basis ; and he 
had sufficient penetration to detect the agencies that had been at 
work in the evolution of the erect bimanous man from the arboreal 
and quadrumanous ape. He had, however, few empirical arguments 
to advance in support of his hypothesis, and it could not be established 
until the further development of the biological sciences—the found- 
ing of comparative embryology by Baer (1828) and of the cell-theory 
by Schleiden and Schwann (1838), the advance of physiology under 
Johannes Miiller (1833), and the enormous progress of palaeontology 
and comparative anatomy between 1820 and 1860—provided this 
necessary foundation. Darwin was the first to coordinate the ample 
results of these lines of research. With no less comprehensiveness 
than discrimination he consolidated them as a basis of a modified 
theory of descent, and associated with them his own theory of natural 
selection, which we take to be distinctive of “Darwinism” in the 
