THE OEIGIN OP MAN 109 



successor, and he fared no better, though he deserved rather 

 more. Neither Owen nor (later on) Mivart was content to stand 

 by and see the triumphs of a school which regarded likeness 

 between Man and the anthropoids as all-important and yet 

 totally disregarded the obvious differences which separated 

 them. Owen was defeated, Mivart was a voice unheeded, 

 yet both worked honestly and in the interests of truth, rather 

 than in the interests of a popular movement. Their fate was 

 the same. The public had been educated. They had come 

 to regard the origin of Man from the existing anthropoids as a 

 settled fact, and having taken this decision after a period of 

 painful disturbance, they were not going to permit an upset 

 of their newly acquired creed. 



It is not to be presumed that we may speak with a tongue 

 so persuasive and so logically incisive as that of Huxley, 

 nor in a voice so dominant and raucous as that of Haeckel 

 — nevertheless the time is now ripe for a school of thought 

 to proclaim itself as being one that insists upon the recognition 

 of difierences as well as upon the institution of likenesses. It 

 is not alone that we are passing through a period when the 

 recasting of opinion might perhaps be more readily efiected ; 

 it is not because we are living in a time which maybe owes 

 its troubles in part to the easy acceptance of the creed of 

 1859 ; but rather because the school which sees no difficulties 

 is gaining added strength from the work of certain palaeonto- 

 logists that I have deemed it timely to deliver this lecture. 

 The palaeontologist has to be satisfied with the examination 

 of very sparse remains of extinct animals; he cannot, of 

 necessity, study the viscera, the muscles, the nerves, or in 

 many cases the structural details of cranial architecture. He 

 is forced back, in most cases, to the study of fragments of 

 the skeleton and the more or less perfect remains of teeth. 

 From the examination of such fragments it is all too easy to 

 assume that the readjustment of the cusps of a molar tooth ' 

 here or there will turn some fossil precursor of a chimpanzee i 

 into the extinct precursor of a Man. But Man differs from i 

 the anthropoids in so many more details of structure than 

 those that can ever be available to the palaeontologist, that 



