Man’s Place in Nature 149 
At the fourth International Congress of Zoology at Cambridge 
(August 26th, 1898) I delivered an address on “Our present knowledge 
of the Descent of Man.” It was translated into English, enriched 
with many valuable notes and additions, by my friend and pupil in 
earlier days Dr Hans Gadow (Cambridge), and published under the 
title: The Last Link; our present knowledge of the Descent of 
Man". The determination of the chief animal forms that occur in 
the line of our ancestry is there restricted to thirty types, and these 
are distributed in six main groups. 
The first half of this “Progonotaxis hominis,’ which has no 
support from fossil evidence, comprises three groups: (i) Protista 
(unicellular organisms, 1—5): (ii) Invertebrate Metazoa (Coelenteria 
6—8, Vermalia 9—11): (iii) Monorrhine Vertebrates (Acrania 12— 
13, Cyclostoma 14—15). The second half, which is based on fossil 
records, also comprises three groups: (iv) Palaeozoic cold-blooded 
Craniota (Fishes 16—18, Amphibia 19, Reptiles 20): (v) Mesozoic 
Mammals (Monotrema 21, Marsupialia 22, Mallotheria 23): (vi) Ce- 
nozoic Primates (Lemuridae 24—25, Tailed Apes 26—-27, Anthropo- 
morpha 28—30). An improved and enlarged edition of this hypothetic 
“Progonotaxis hominis” was published in 1908, in my essay Unsere 
Ahnenreihe*. , 
If I have succeeded in furthering, in some degree, by these an- 
thropological works, the solution of the great problem of Man’s place 
in nature, and particularly in helping to trace the definite stages in 
our ancestral series, I owe the success, not merely to the vast progress 
that biology has made in the last half century, but largely to the 
luminous example of the great investigators who have applied them- 
selves to the problem, with so much assiduity and genius, for a 
century and a quarter—I mean Goethe and Lamarck, Gegenbaur and 
Huxley, but, above all, Charles Darwin. It was the great genius of 
Darwin that first brought together the scattered material of biology 
and shaped it into that symmetrical temple of scientific knowledge, 
the theory of descent. It was Darwin who put the crown on the 
edifice by his theory of natural selection. Not until this broad in- 
ductive law was firmly established was it possible to vindicate the 
special conclusion, the descent of man from a series of other Verte- 
brates. By his illuminating discovery Darwin did more for anthro- 
pology than thousands of those writers, who are more specifically 
titled anthropologists, have done by their technical treatises. We 
may, indeed, say that it is not merely as an exact observer and ingenious 
experimenter, but as a distinguished anthropologist and far-seeing 
1 London, 1898, 
2 Festschrift zur 350-jdhrigen Jubelfeier der Thilringer Universitdét Jena. Jena, 
1908. 
