s considerations, old prejudices,
the reluctance to accept man, who so far surpasses mentally all
other creatures, as descended from "soulless" animals, prevent a few
investigators from giving full adherence to the doctrine. But there are
very few of these who still postulate a special act of creation for
man. Although the majority of experts in anatomy and zoology accept
unconditionally the descent of man from lower forms, there is much
diversity of opinion among them in regard to the special line of
descent.

In trying to establish any special hypothesis of descent, whether by
the graphic method of drawing up genealogical trees or otherwise, let us
always bear in mind Darwin's words ("Descent of Man", page 229.) and use
them as a critical guiding line: "As we have no record of the lines of
descent, the pedigree can be discovered only by observing the degrees of
resemblance between the beings which are to be classed." Darwin carries
this further by stating "that resemblances in several unimportant
structures, in useless and rudimentary organs, or not now functionally
active, or in an embryological condition, are by far the most
serviceable for classification." (Loc. cit.) It has also to be
remembered that NUMEROUS separate points of agreement are of much
greater importance than the amount of similarity or dissimilarity in a
few points.

The hypotheses as to descent current at the present day may be divided
into two main groups. The first group seeks for the roots of the human
race not among any of the families of the apes--the anatomically nearest
forms--nor among their very similar but less specialised ancestral
forms, the fossil representatives of which we can know only in part,
but, setting the monkeys on one side, it seeks for them lower down among
the fossil Eocene Pseudo-lemuridae or Lemuridae (Cope), or even among
the primitive pentadactylous Eocene forms, which may either have led
directly to the evolution of man (Adloff), or have given rise to an
ancestral form common to apes and men (Klaatsch (Klaatsch in his last
publications speaks in the main only of an ancestral form common to men
and anthropoid apes.), Giuffrida-Ruggeri). The common ancestral form,
from which man and apes are thus supposed to have arisen independently,
may explain the numerous resemblances which actually exist between
them. That is to say, all the characters upon which the great structural
resemblance between apes and man depends must