We owe so much of the progress of scientific knowledge to Darwin's
Origin of Species that its influence is almost without parallel in the
history of science. The literature of Darwinism grows from day to day,
not only on the side of academic zoology and botany, the sciences
which were chiefly affected by Darwin's theory, but in a far wider
circle, so that we find Darwinism discussed in popular literature with
a vigour and zest that are given to no other scientific conception.
This remarkable success is due chiefly to two circumstances. In the
first place, all the sciences, and especially biology, have made
astounding progress in the last half-century, and have furnished a
very vast quantity of proofs of the theory of evolution. In striking
contrast to the failure of Lamarck and the older scientists to attract
attention to their effort to explain the origin of living things and
of man, we have this second and successful effort of Darwin, which was
able to gather to its support a large number of established facts.
Availing himself of the progress already made, he had very different
scientific proofs to allege than Lamarck, or St. Hilaire, or Goethe,
or Treviranus had had. But, in the second place, we must acknowledge
that Darwin had the special distinction of approaching the subject
from an entirely new side, and of basing the theory of descent on a
consistent system, which now goes by the name of Darwinism.
Lamarck had unsuccessfully attempted to explain the modification of
organisms that descend from a common form chiefly by the action of
habit and the use of organs, though with the aid of heredity. But
Darwin's success was complete when he independently sought to give a
mechanical explanation, on a quite new ground, of this modification of
plant and animal structures by adaptation and heredity. He was
impelled to his theory of selection on the following grounds. He
compared the origin of the various kinds of animals and plants which
we modify artificially--by the action of artificial selection in
horticulture and among domestic animals--with the origin of the
species of animals and plants in their natural state. He then found
that the agencies which we employ in the modification of forms by
artificial selection are also at work in Nature. The chief of these
agencies he held to be "the struggle for life." The gist of this
peculiarly Darwinian idea is given in this formula: The struggle for
existence produces new species without premeditated design in the life
of Nature, in the same way that the will of man consciously selects
new races in artificial conditions. The gardener or the farmer selects
new forms as he wills for his own profit, by ingeniously using the
agency of heredity and adaptation for the modification of structures;
so, in the natural state, the struggle for life is always
unconsciously modifying the various species of living things. This
struggle for life, or competition of organisms in securing the means
of subsistence, acts without any conscious design, but it is none the
less effective in modifying structures. As heredity and adaptation
enter into the closest reciprocal action under its influence, new
structures, or alterations of structure, are produced; and these are
purposive in the sense that they serve the organism when formed, but
they were produced without any pre-conceived aim.
This simple idea is the central thought of Darwinism, or the theory of
selection. Darwin conceived this idea at an early date, and then, for
more than twenty years, worked at the collection of empirical evidence
in support of it before he published his theory. His grandfather,
Erasmus Darwin, was an able scientist of the older school of natural
philosophy, who published a number of natural-philosophic works about
the end of the eighteenth century. The most important of them is his
Zoonomia, published in 1794, in which he expounds views similar to
those of Goethe and Lamarck, without really knowing anything of the
work of these contemporaries. However, in the writings of the
grandfather the plastic imagination rather outran the judgment, while
in Charles Darwin the two were better balanced.
Darwin did not publish any account of his theory until 1858, when
Alfred Russel Wallace, who had independently reached the same theory
of selection, published his own work. In the following year appeared
the Origin of Species, in which he develops it at length and supports
it with a mass of proof. Wallace had reached the same conclusion, but
he had not so clear a perception as Darwin of the effectiveness of
natural selection in forming species, and did not develop the theory
so fully. Nevertheless, Wallace's writings, especially those on
mimicry, etc., and an admirable work on The Geographical Distribution
of Animals, contain many fine original contributions to the theory of
selection. Unfortunately, this gifted scientist has since devoted
himself to spiritism.* (* Darwin and Wallace arrived at the theory
quite independently. Vide Wallace's Contributions to the Theory of
Natural Selection (1870) and Darwinism (1891).)
Darwin's Origin of Species had an extraordinary influence, though not
at first on the experts of the science. It took zoologists and
botanists several years to recover from the astonishment into which
they had been thrown through the revolutionary idea of the work. But
its influence on the special sciences with which we zoologists and
botanists are concerned has increased from year to year; it has
introduced a most healthy fermentation in every branch of biology,
especially in comparative anatomy and ontogeny, and in zoological and
botanical classification. In this way it has brought about almost a
revolution in the prevailing views.
However, the point which chiefly concerns us here--the extension of
the theory to man--was not touched at all in Darwin's first work in
1859. It was believed for several years that he had no thought of
applying his principles to man, but that he shared the current idea of
man holding a special position in the universe. Not only ignorant
laymen (especially several theologians), but also a number of men of
science, said very naively that Darwinism in itself was not to be
opposed; that it was quite right to use it to explain the origin of
the various species of plants and animals, but that it was totally
inapplicable to man.
In the meantime, however, it seemed to a good many thoughtful people,
laymen as well as scientists, that this was wrong; that the descent of
man from some other animal species, and immediately from some ape-like
mammal, followed logically and necessarily from Darwin's reformed
theory of evolution. Many of the acuter opponents of the theory saw at
once the justice of this position, and, as this consequence was
intolerable, they wanted to get rid of the whole theory.
The first scientific application of the Darwinian theory to man was
made by Huxley, the greatest zoologist in England. This able and
learned scientist, to whom zoology owes much of its progress,
published in 1863 a small work entitled Evidence as to Man's Place in
Nature. In the extremely important and interesting lectures which made
up this work he proved clearly that the descent of man from the ape
followed necessarily from the theory of descent. If that theory is
true, we are bound to conceive the animals which most closely resemble
man as those from which humanity has been gradually evolved. About the
same time Carl Vogt published a larger work on the same subject. We
must also mention Gustav Jaeger and Friedrich Rolle among the
zoologists who accepted and taught the theory of evolution immediately
after the publication of Darwin's book, and maintained that the
descent of man from the lower animals logically followed from it. The
latter published, in 1866, a work on the origin and position of man.
About the same time I attempted, in the second volume of my General
Morphology (1866), to apply the theory of evolution to the whole
organic kingdom, including man.* (* Huxley spoke of this "as one of
the greatest scientific works ever published."--Translator.) I
endeavoured to sketch the probable ancestral trees of the various
classes of the animal world, the protists, and the plants, as it
seemed necessary to do on Darwinian principles, and as we can actually
do now with a high degree of confidence. If the theory of descent,
which Lamarck first clearly formulated and Darwin thoroughly
established, is true, we should be able to draw up a natural
classification of plants and animals in the light of their genealogy,
and to conceive the large and small divisions of the system as the
branches and twigs of an ancestral tree. The eight genealogical tables
which I inserted in the second volume of the General Morphology are
the first sketches of their kind. In Chapter 2.27, particularly, I
trace the chief stages in man's ancestry, as far as it is possible to
follow it through the vertebrate stem. I tried especially to
determine, as well as one could at that time, the position of man in
the classification of the mammals and its genealogical significance. I
have greatly improved this attempt, and treated it in a more popular
form, in chapters 26 to 28 of my History of Creation (1868).* (* Of
which Darwin said that the Descent of Man would probably never have
been written if he had seen it earlier.--Translator.)
It was not until 1871, twelve years after the appearance of The Origin
of Species, that Darwin published the famous work which made the
much-contested application of his theory to man, and crowned the
splendid structure of his system. This important work was The Descent
of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. In this Darwin expressly
drew the conclusion, with rigorous logic, that man also must have been
developed out of lower species, and described the important part
played by sexual selection in the elevation of man and the other
higher animals. He showed that the careful selection which the sexes
exercise on each other in regard to sexual relations and procreation,
and the aesthetic feeling which the higher animals develop through
this, are of the utmost importance in the progressive development of
forms and the differentiation of the sexes. The males choosing the
handsomest females in one class of animals, and the females choosing
only the finest-looking males in another, the special features and the
sexual characteristics are increasingly accentuated. In fact, some of
the higher animals develop in this connection a finer taste and
judgment than man himself. But, even as regards man, it is to this
sexual selection that we owe the family-life, which is the chief
foundation of civilisation. The rise of the human race is due for the
most part to the advanced sexual selection which our ancestors
exercised in choosing their mates.
Darwin accepted in the main the general outlines of man's ancestral
tree, as I gave it in the General Morphology and the History of
Creation, and admitted that his studies led him to the same
conclusion. That he did not at once apply the theory to man in his
first work was a commendable piece of discretion; such a sequel was
bound to excite the strongest opposition to the whole theory. The
first thing to do was to establish it as regards the animal and plant
worlds. The subsequent extension to man was bound to be made sooner or
later.
It is important to understand this very clearly. If all living things
come from a common root, man must be included in the general scheme of
evolution. On the other hand, if the various species were separately
created, man, too, must have been created, and not evolved. We have to
choose between these two alternatives. This cannot be too frequently
or too strongly emphasised. EITHER all the species of animals and
plants are of supernatural origin--created, not evolved--and in that
case man also is the outcome of a creative act, as religion teaches,
OR the different species have been evolved from a few common, simple
ancestral forms, and in that case man is the highest fruit of the tree
of evolution.
We may state this briefly in the following principle--The descent of
man from the lower animals is a special deduction which inevitably
follows from the general inductive law of the whole theory of
evolution. In this principle we have a clear and plain statement of
the matter. Evolution is in reality nothing but a great induction,
which we are compelled to make by the comparative study of the most
important facts of morphology and physiology. But we must draw our
conclusion according to the laws of induction, and not attempt to
determine scientific truths by direct measurement and mathematical
calculation. In the study of living things we can scarcely ever
directly and fully, and with mathematical accuracy, determine the
nature of phenomena, as is done in the simpler study of the inorganic
world--in chemistry, physics, mineralogy, and astronomy. In the
latter, especially, we can always use the simplest and absolutely
safest method--that of mathematical determination. But in biology this
is quite impossible for various reasons; one very obvious reason being
that most of the facts of the science are very complicated and much
too intricate to allow a direct mathematical analysis. The greater
part of the phenomena that biology deals with are complicated
HISTORICAL PROCESSES, which are related to a far-reaching past, and as
a rule can only be approximately estimated. Hence we have to proceed
by INDUCTION--that is to say, to draw general conclusions, stage by
stage, and with proportionate confidence, from the accumulation of
detailed observations. These inductive conclusions cannot command
absolute confidence, like mathematical axioms; but they approach the
truth, and gain increasing probability, in proportion as we extend the
basis of observed facts on which we build. The importance of these
inductive laws is not diminished from the circumstance that they are
looked upon merely as temporary acquisitions of science, and may be
improved to any extent in the progress of scientific knowledge. The
same may be said of the attainments of many other sciences, such as
geology or archeology. However much they may be altered and improved
in detail in the course of time, these inductive truths may retain
their substance unchanged.
Now, when we say that the theory of evolution in the sense of Lamarck
and Darwin is an inductive law--in fact, the greatest of all
biological inductions--we rely, in the first place, on the facts of
paleontology. This science gives us some direct acquaintance with the
historical phenomena of the changes of species. From the situations in
which we find the fossils in the various strata of the earth we gather
confidently, in the first place, that the living population of the
earth has been gradually developed, as clearly as the earth's crust
itself; and that, in the second place, several different populations
have succeeded each other in the various geological periods. Modern
geology teaches that the formation of the earth has been gradual, and
unbroken by any violent revolutions. And when we compare together the
various kinds of animals and plants which succeed each other in the
history of our planet, we find, in the first place, a constant and
gradual increase in the number of species from the earliest times
until the present day; and, in the second place, we notice that the
forms in each great group of animals and plants also constantly
improve as the ages advance. Thus, of the vertebrates there are at
first only the lower fishes; then come the higher fishes, and later
the amphibia. Still later appear the three higher classes of
vertebrates--the reptiles, birds, and mammals, for the first time;
only the lowest and least perfect forms of the mammals are found at
first; and it is only at a very late period that placental mammals
appear, and man belongs to the latest and youngest branch of these.
Thus perfection of form increases as well as variety from the earliest
to the latest stage. That is a fact of the greatest importance. It can
only be explained by the theory of evolution, with which it is in
perfect harmony. If the different groups of plants and animals do
really descend from each other, we must expect to find this increase
in their number and perfection under the influence of natural
selection, just as the succession of fossils actually discloses it to
us.
Comparative anatomy furnishes a second series of facts which are of
great importance for the forming of our inductive law. This branch of
morphology compares the adult structures of living things, and seeks
in the great variety of organic forms the stable and simple law of
organisation, or the common type or structure. Since Cuvier founded
this science at the beginning of the nineteenth century it has been a
favourite study of the most distinguished scientists. Even before
Cuvier's time Goethe had been greatly stimulated by it, and induced to
take up the study of morphology. Comparative osteology, or the
philosophic study and comparison of the bony skeleton of the
vertebrates--one of its most interesting sections--especially
fascinated him, and led him to form the theory of the skull which I
mentioned before. Comparative anatomy shows that the internal
structure of the animals of each stem and the plants of each class is
the same in its essential features, however much they differ in
external appearance. Thus man has so great a resemblance in the chief
features of his internal organisation to the other mammals that no
comparative anatomist has ever doubted that he belongs to this class.
The whole internal structure of the human body, the arrangement of its
various systems of organs, the distribution of the bones, muscles,
blood-vessels, etc., and the whole structure of these organs in the
larger and the finer scale, agree so closely with those of the other
mammals (such as the apes, rodents, ungulates, cetacea, marsupials,
etc.) that their external differences are of no account whatever. We
learn further from comparative anatomy that the chief features of
animal structure are so similar in the various classes (fifty to sixty
in number altogether) that they may all be comprised in from eight to
twelve great groups. But even in these groups, the stem-forms or
animal types, certain organs (especially the alimentary canal) can be
proved to have been originally the same for all. We can only explain
by the theory of evolution this essential unity in internal structure
of all these animal forms that differ so much in outward appearance.
This wonderful fact can only be really understood and explained when
we regard the internal resemblance as an inheritance from common-stem
forms, and the external differences as the effect of adaptation to
different environments.
In recognising this, comparative anatomy has itself advanced to a
higher stage. Gegenbaur, the most distinguished of recent students of
this science, says that with the theory of evolution a new period
began in comparative anatomy, and that the theory in turn found a
touch stone in the science. "Up to now there is no fact in comparative
anatomy that is inconsistent with the theory of evolution; indeed,
they all lead to it. In this way the theory receives back from the
science all the service it rendered to its method." Until then
students had marvelled at the wonderful resemblance of living things
in their inner structure without being able to explain it. We are now
in a position to explain the causes of this, by showing that this
remarkable agreement is the necessary consequence of the inheriting of
common stem-forms; while the striking difference in outward appearance
is a result of adaptation to changes of environment. Heredity and
adaptation alone furnish the true explanation.
But one special part of comparative anatomy is of supreme interest and
of the utmost philosophic importance in this connection. This is the
science of rudimentary or useless organs; I have given it the name of
"dysteleology" in view of its philosophic consequences. Nearly every
organism (apart from the very lowest), and especially every
highly-developed animal or plant, including man, has one or more
organs which are of no use to the body itself, and have no share in
its functions or vital aims. Thus we all have, in various parts of our
frame, muscles which we never use, as, for instance, in the shell of
the ear and adjoining parts. In most of the mammals, especially those
with pointed ears, these internal and external ear-muscles are of
great service in altering the shell of the ear, so as to catch the
waves of sound as much as possible. But in the case of man and other
short-eared mammals these muscles are useless, though they are still
present. Our ancestors having long abandoned the use of them, we
cannot work them at all to-day. In the inner corner of the eye we have
a small crescent-shaped fold of skin; this is the last relic of a
third inner eye-lid, called the nictitating (winking) membrane. This
membrane is highly developed and of great service in some of our
distant relations, such as fishes of the shark type and several other
vertebrates; in us it is shrunken and useless. In the intestines we
have a process that is not only quite useless, but may be very
harmful--the vermiform appendage. This small intestinal appendage is
often the cause of a fatal illness. If a cherry-stone or other hard
body is unfortunately squeezed through its narrow aperture during
digestion, a violent inflammation is set up, and often proves fatal.
This appendix has no use whatever now in our frame; it is a dangerous
relic of an organ that was much larger and was of great service in our
vegetarian ancestors. It is still large and important in many
vegetarian animals, such as apes and rodents.
There are similar rudimentary organs in all parts of our body, and in
all the higher animals. They are among the most interesting phenomena
to which comparative anatomy introduces us; partly because they
furnish one of the clearest proofs of evolution, and partly because
they most strikingly refute the teleology of certain philosophers. The
theory of evolution enables us to give a very simple explanation of
these phenomena.
We have to look on them as organs which have fallen into disuse in the
course of many generations. With the decrease in the use of its
function, the organ itself shrivels up gradually, and finally
disappears. There is no other way of explaining rudimentary organs.
Hence they are also of great interest in philosophy; they show clearly
that the monistic or mechanical view of the organism is the only
correct one, and that the dualistic or teleological conception is
wrong. The ancient legend of the direct creation of man according to a
pre-conceived plan and the empty phrases about "design" in the
organism are completely shattered by them. It would be difficult to
conceive a more thorough refutation of teleology than is furnished by
the fact that all the higher animals have these rudimentary organs.
The theory of evolution finds its broadest inductive foundation in the
natural classification of living things, which arranges all the
various forms in larger and smaller groups, according to their degree
of affinity. These groupings or categories of classification--the
varieties, species, genera, families, orders, classes, etc.--show such
constant features of coordination and subordination that we are bound
to look on them as genealogical, and represent the whole system in the
form of a branching tree. This is the genealogical tree of the
variously related groups; their likeness in form is the expression of
a real affinity. As it is impossible to explain in any other way the
natural tree-like form of the system of organisms, we must regard it
at once as a weighty proof of the truth of evolution. The careful
construction of these genealogical trees is, therefore, not an
amusement, but the chief task of modern classification.
Among the chief phenomena that bear witness to the inductive law of
evolution we have the geographical distribution of the various species
of animals and plants over the surface of the earth, and their
topographical distribution on the summits of mountains and in the
depths of the ocean. The scientific study of these features--the
"science of distribution," or chorology (chora = a place)--has been
pursued with lively interest since the discoveries made by Alexander
von Humboldt. Until Darwin's time the work was confined to the
determination of the facts of the science, and chiefly aimed at
settling the spheres of distribution of the existing large and small
groups of living things. It was impossible at that time to explain the
causes of this remarkable distribution, or the reasons why one group
is found only in one locality and another in a different place, and
why there is this manifold distribution at all. Here, again, the
theory of evolution has given us the solution of the problem. It
furnishes the only possible explanation when it teaches that the
various species and groups of species descend from common stem-forms,
whose ever-branching offspring have gradually spread themselves by
migration over the earth. For each group of species we must admit a
"centre of production," or common home; this is the original habitat
in which the ancestral form was developed, and from which its
descendants spread out in every direction. Several of these
descendants became in their turn the stem-forms for new groups of
species, and these also scattered themselves by active and passive
migration, and so on. As each migrating organism found a different
environment in its new home, and adapted itself to it, it was
modified, and gave rise to new forms.
This very important branch of science that deals with active and
passive migration was founded by Darwin, with the aid of the theory of
evolution; and at the same time he advanced the true explanation of
the remarkable relation or similarity of the living population in any
locality to the fossil forms found in it. Moritz Wagner very ably
developed his idea under the title of "the theory of migration." In my
opinion, this famous traveller has rather over-estimated the value of
his theory of migration when he takes it to be an indispensable
condition of the formation of new species and opposes the theory of
selection. The two theories are not opposed in their main features.
Migration (by which the stem-form of a new species is isolated) is
really only a special case of selection. The striking and interesting
facts of chorology can be explained only by the theory of evolution,
and therefore we must count them among the most important of its
inductive bases.
The same must be said of all the remarkable phenomena which we
perceive in the economy of the living organism. The many and various
relations of plants and animals to each other and to their
environment, which are treated in bionomy (from nomos, law or norm,
and bios, life), the interesting facts of parasitism, domesticity,
care of the young, social habits, etc., can only be explained by the
action of heredity and adaptation. Formerly people saw only the
guidance of a beneficent Providence in these phenomena; to-day we
discover in them admirable proofs of the theory of evolution. It is
impossible to understand them except in the light of this theory and
the struggle for life.
Finally, we must, in my opinion, count among the chief inductive bases
of the theory of evolution the foetal development of the individual
organism, the whole science of embryology or ontogeny. But as the
later chapters will deal with this in detail, I need say nothing
further here. I shall endeavour in the following pages to show, step
by step, how the whole of the embryonic phenomena form a massive chain
of proof for the theory of evolution; for they can be explained in no
other way. In thus appealing to the close causal connection between
ontogenesis and phylogenesis, and taking our stand throughout on the
biogenetic law, we shall be able to prove, stage by stage, from the
facts of embryology, the evolution of man from the lower animals.
The general adoption of the theory of evolution has definitely closed
the controversy as to the nature or definition of the species. The
word has no ABSOLUTE meaning whatever, but is only a group-name, or
category of classification, with a purely relative value. In 1857, it
is true, a famous and gifted, but inaccurate and dogmatic, scientist,
Louis Agassiz, attempted to give an absolute value to these
"categories of classification." He did this in his Essay on
Classification, in which he turns upside down the phenomena of organic
nature, and, instead of tracing them to their natural causes, examines
them through a theological prism. The true species (bona species) was,
he said, an "incarnate idea of the Creator." Unfortunately, this
pretty phrase has no more scientific value than all the other attempts
to save the absolute or intrinsic value of the species.
The dogma of the fixity and creation of species lost its last great
champion when Agassiz died in 1873. The opposite theory, that all the
different species descend from common stem-forms, encounters no
serious difficulty to-day. All the endless research into the nature of
the species, and the possibility of several species descending from a
common ancestor, has been closed to-day by the removal of the sharp
limits that had been set up between species and varieties on the one
hand, and species and genera on the other. I gave an analytic proof of
this in my monograph on the sponges (1872), having made a very close
study of variability in this small but highly instructive group, and
shown the impossibility of making any dogmatic distinction of species.
According as the classifier takes his ideas of genus, species, and
variety in a broader or in a narrower sense, he will find in the small
group of the sponges either one genus with three species, or three
genera with 238 species, or 113 genera with 591 species. Moreover, all
these forms are so connected by intermediate forms that we can
convincingly prove the descent of all the sponges from a common
stem-form, the olynthus.
Here, I think, I have given an analytic solution of the problem of the
origin of species, and so met the demand of certain opponents of
evolution for an actual instance of descent from a stem-form. Those
who are not satisfied with the synthetic proofs of the theory of
evolution which are provided by comparative anatomy, embryology,
paleontology, dysteleology, chorology, and classification, may try to
refute the analytic proof given in my treatise on the sponge, the
outcome of five years of assiduous study. I repeat: It is now
impossible to oppose evolution on the ground that we have no
convincing example of the descent of all the species of a group from a
common ancestor. The monograph on the sponges furnishes such a proof,
and, in my opinion, an indisputable proof. Any man of science who will
follow the protracted steps of my inquiry and test my assertions will
find that in the case of the sponges we can follow the actual
evolution of species in a concrete case. And if this is so, if we can
show the origin of all the species from a common form in one single
class, we have the solution of the problem of man's origin, because we
are in a position to prove clearly his descent from the lower animals.
At the same time, we can now reply to the often-repeated assertion,
even heard from scientists of our own day, that the descent of man
from the lower animals, and proximately from the apes, still needs to
be "proved with certainty." These "certain proofs" have been available
for a long time; one has only to open one's eyes to see them. It is a
mistake to seek them in the discovery of intermediate forms between
man and the ape, or the conversion of an ape into a human being by
skilful education. The proofs lie in the great mass of empirical
material we have already collected. They are furnished in the
strongest form by the data of comparative anatomy and embryology,
completed by paleontology. It is not a question now of detecting new
proofs of the evolution of man, but of examining and understanding the
proofs we already have.
I was almost alone thirty-six years ago when I made the first attempt,
in my General Morphology, to put organic science on a mechanical
foundation through Darwin's theory of descent. The association of
ontogeny and phylogeny and the proof of the intimate causal connection
between these two sections of the science of evolution, which I
expounded in my work, met with the most spirited opposition on nearly
all sides. The next ten years were a terrible "struggle for life" for
the new theory. But for the last twenty-five years the tables have
been turned. The phylogenetic method has met with so general a
reception, and found so prolific a use in every branch of biology,
that it seems superfluous to treat any further here of its validity
and results. The proof of it lies in the whole morphological
literature of the last three decades. But no other science has been so
profoundly modified in its leading thoughts by this adoption, and been
forced to yield such far-reaching consequences, as that science which
I am now seeking to establish--monistic anthropogeny.
This statement may seem to be rather audacious, since the very next
branch of biology, anthropology in the stricter sense, makes very
little use of these results of anthropogeny, and sometimes expressly
opposes them.* (*This does not apply to English anthropologists, who
are almost all evolutionists.) This applies especially to the attitude
which has characterised the German Anthropological Society (the
Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Anthropologie) for some thirty years. Its
powerful president, the famous pathologist, Rudolph Virchow, is
chiefly responsible for this. Until his death (September 5th, 1902) he
never ceased to reject the theory of descent as unproven, and to
ridicule its chief consequence--the descent of man from a series of
mammal ancestors--as a fantastic dream. I need only recall his
well-known expression at the Anthropological Congress at Vienna in
1894, that "it would be just as well to say man came from the sheep or
the elephant as from the ape."
Virchow's assistant, the secretary of the German Anthropological
Society, Professor Johannes Ranke of Munich, has also indefatigably
opposed transformism: he has succeeded in writing a work in two
volumes (Der Mensch), in which all the facts relating to his
organisation are explained in a sense hostile to evolution. This work
has had a wide circulation, owing to its admirable illustrations and
its able treatment of the most interesting facts of anatomy and
physiology--exclusive of the sexual organs! But, as it has done a
great deal to spread erroneous views among the general public, I have
included a criticism of it in my History of Creation, as well as met
Virchow's attacks on anthropogeny.
Neither Virchow, nor Ranke, nor any other "exact" anthropologist, has
attempted to give any other natural explanation of the origin of man.
They have either set completely aside this "question of questions" as
a transcendental problem, or they have appealed to religion for its
solution. We have to show that this rejection of the rational
explanation is totally without justification. The fund of knowledge
which has accumulated in the progress of biology in the nineteenth
century is quite adequate to furnish a rational explanation, and to
establish the theory of the evolution of man on the solid facts of his
embryology.