Man and his Ancestry

Abstract

SIXTY-NINE years ago, at the British Association assembles in Leech, Sir Richard Owen, the first anatomis of his age, poured storn on the theory of mans descent from anthropoid stock, a theory which the president of to-day, another distinguished anatomist, regards as unshakable. Since the publication of “The Descent of Man” in 1871, we have come to know more than a little of the precursors of Homo sapiens, and this direct evidence of anthropoid ancestry has been corroborated on many sides. Thus the blood of man and that of the great anthropoid apes gives almost the same reaction; in the anthropoid brain are to be recognised all those parts which have been magnified in man; we find the same vestigial structures or ‘evolutionary post-marks’ in apes and in ourselves; the embryos of the two stocks develop along the same main path; the anthropoid mother fondles, mirses, and suckles her young in the human manner. “The fundamentals of Darwin's outline of man's history remain unshaken.”