May 19, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



783 



up from a more varied group of vigorous 

 sires than that of any earlier scion. The 

 themes of culture-union and blood-blending 

 are too broad and deep for treatment in a 

 paragraph ; yet it must be affirmed, with an 

 emphasis which can hardly be made too 

 strong, that these are the dominant factors 

 of human development, and that this de- 

 velopment, so far as actually observed, is 

 always convergent, never divergent. 



Now it is a logical corollary of the law of 

 convergent development that mankind were 

 originally more diverse than now, and 

 hence that there must have been several 

 loci or centers of human origin ; and this 

 corollary leads to a theory of polygenesis, 

 which has been much discussed during a 

 decade or two. Some of the polygenesists, 

 like Keane, are content with four original 

 stocks, corresponding, respectively, to the 

 white, black, brown and yellow 'races' of 

 mankind (leaving the red man, or Amerind, 

 to be interpreted perhaps as a migrated 

 branch of the brown stock) ; others, like 

 Powell, find it easier to think of an indefi- 

 nitely large number of initial stocks and 

 centers of development from a hypothetic 

 prototype to the 'human form divine' — a 

 prototype represented, perhaps, in a par- 

 ticular place by the famous fossil from 

 Java, the Pithecanthropos erectus of Du- 

 bois. The alternative hypothesis is that of 

 the monogenesis assumed in the early days 

 of man-science; and the choice — or adjust- 

 ment—between these opposing views is one 

 of the most prominent among the present 

 problems of anthropology. The great facts 

 are (1) that all known lines of human de- 

 velopment are convergent forward and 

 hence divergent backward, and (2) that all 

 well-known lines of biotic {i. e., sub-hu- 

 man) development are divergent forward; 

 how these incongruous lines are to be 

 united across the dark chasm of that un- 

 known time when man became man remains 



a question, only made larger thus far by 

 each advance of knowledge. 



THE PROBLEM OF HUMANITIZATION. 



To the comparative anatomist the gap 

 between simian structure and human struc- 

 ture was of little note even before it was 

 divided by the Dubois discovery in Java; 

 for the differences between higher apes and 

 lower men are less than those between 

 either (1) lower and higher apes, or (2) 

 lower and higher men. Yet to the sympa- 

 thetic student of mankind these dead 

 homologies are but unsatisfying husks — 

 the great fact remains that even the lowest 

 savage known to experience is human — man 

 — in attitude, mien, habits and intelligence, 

 while even the highest apes are but bristly 

 beasts. It were bootless to deny or decry 

 the chasm separating the always human 

 biped from the always beastly quadru- 

 mane, since it is the broadest in the entire 

 realm of nature as seen by those who ap- 

 preciate humanity in its fulness. How the 

 chasm was crossed, either in the one place 

 and time required by monogenesis or in the 

 many places and times demanded by poly- 

 genesis, is a question of such moment as to 

 rank among the great problems of anthro- 

 pology until (if ever) the solution is 

 wrought. A tentative solution has, indeed, 

 been suggested in the modified form of 

 mating which must have attended the as- 

 sumption of the erect attitude ; yet final 

 solution awaits the future.* 



THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN ANTIQUITY. 



So long as the assumption of monogenesis 

 prevailed, the question of the antiquity of 

 man loomed large in the minds of students, 

 while even under the hypothesis of poly- 

 genesis the date (geological or historical) 

 of advent of the earliest man is of no small 

 interest. So the discussion of human an- 



* ' The Trend of Human Progress,' American 

 Anthropologist, Vol. I., 1899, p. 418. 



