Man's Place among the Mammals

Abstract

EARLY in 1918, Prof. F. Wood Jones gave a popular lecture in King's College, London, on man's origin. This lecture, when published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge under the title “The Problem of Man's Ancestry”, met with a mixed reception. Anatomists treated it with neglect or contempt; those of an anti-Darwinian bias hailed it with delight. As the little book of 1918 is really the parent of the large work which has just appeared under the title “Man's Place among the Mammals”, it is worth while to seek for an explanation of the diversity of feeling evoked by the original publication. The antagonistic attitude of most anatomists is understandable. They were told that man, far from being as they thought the most changed, the most specialised, the most highly evolved of all primate animals, was, when his structural characters were rightly analysed, essentially a very ancient and primitive type. They learned that they had laboured in vain, because in construing the evidence relating to man's origin they had been dominated by a heresy for which Darwin, Huxley, and Haeckel were conjointly responsible, namely, that there had been an anthropoidal stage in man's evolution. Prof. Wood Jones summarily dismissed the anthropoids living and extinct at no time had they any lot or part in man's ancestry. Man's Place among the Mammals. By Prof. Frederic Wood Jones. Pp. xi + 372 + 12 plates. (London: Edward Arnold and Co., 1929.) 21s. net.