Friedenthal's Experimental Proof of Blood-Relationship

Abstract

IN recent years important evidence in favor of Darwin's theory of the descent of man has increased. Eutg^en Dubois found in PI//ecazi//iropits crtiaus the much-sought-for missing link between man and living anthropoid apes. Selenka has shown that, of the catarrhine apes, the living anthropoid apes resemble man in having a placenta discoidalis capsularis, while all other catarrhines have a placenta bidiscoiclalis. Ernst Haeckel has accumulated evidence showing that man has descended from a line of extinct catarrhincs whose immediate ancestors belonged to the group of tailless anthropoid apes, and whose more remote ancestors belonged to the Cynopithecili. The evidence afforded by comparative paleontology, comparative embryology, and comparative anatomy agrees in supporting Darwin's hypothesis. To all this evidence is now added evidence dependingupon the similarity in chemical composition of the blood of closely related animals. Comparative chemical analyses of blood are attended with great difficulties because of variations in the blood depending upon the varying conditions of nutrition in the animal. Landois, in his researches on the effects of animal blood transfusions upon human diseases, attributed his failures, so far as the beneficial effects of the blood transfusion upon the disease were concerned, to the dissolving of the red blood corpuscles of the injected blood by the blood of the recipient. Experiments upon lower animals, in the way of injecting blood from some animal of a remote species, led to the same results as the experiments upon man. The animals