THE ORIGIN OF MAN.
Having in a measure defined both in time and space the first appear ance of man on our globe, we are prepared to go a step farther and inquire how he came there—what natural or divine forces brought him into being.
The answers to these questions which have been offered may be arranged in three classes : The first explains man's presence by a special creation, by a direct fiat of the Almighty, which brought him into existence complete in all his faculties. Almost all religions teach this doctrine in one form or another. As it removes the inquiry from the domain of research to that of belief; scientific men do not generally rest satisfied with this reply, but suggest other possible theories of man's origin.
Theories of first of these is by heterogenesis. By this is meant that the parents of one species might bring forth offspring so widely different from themselves that this offspring would become the starting-point of what would be virtually another and a new species. We all know as a familiar fact that no child is precisely like its parents. Sometimes the difference is very marked, both in physical appearance and mental disposition. In many of the lower animals and under certain conditions this discrepancy is accentuated to such a degree that we could not believe parents and offspring to be of the same race had their life history not been traced. It is utterly inexplicable how some men of the most brilliant genius come to be born of a line of most commonplace ancestors. So, it is argued, there is nothing incredible in the supposition that a child capable of inventing a tool and building a fire could have been born to an anthropoid ape ; and these two advantages seem to have been all that the earliest men possessed above the highest mammals. With them they were qualified, by slow degrees but surely, to conquer the world.
The second theory is that by evolution under known laws. This is the " Darwinian Theory," as it is called, and has received a great deal of attention. It is a part of the general theory of the evolution of
organic forms which Darwin extended to both the animal and vegetable world. As applied to the human race, he developed it quite fully in his celebrated work entitled The Descent of Man, and his suggestions have found favor with many ethnologists.
Darwin's theory is sometimes stated to be that man is descended from the monkey or one of the apes. This is an error which he himself point edly corrected. His conclusion was that " man is the descendant, with other species, of some ancient, lower, and extinct form." No competent anatomist to-day would maintain that the human species was or could be the offspring, however remote, of any other known species of animal.
Arguments for Evolution.—The arguments for the development of man from a lower form are drawn from several sources. First, we may observe that the most ancient osseous remains of man, as well as the lowest existing varieties, have more points of similarity with the next highest mammals than have the present highest types of the race. The skulls exhumed from the ancient undisturbed strata of Western Europe have thick walls, heavy jaws, the lower half of the face prominent, but the chin and forehead retreating, and the brain-capacity small. The tibia or shinbone is flattened instead of triangular, the bone of the arm is per forated at its extremity, the areas of the insertion of muscles are rougher and more prominent, and in other respects the bones assimilate more closely to those of lower species. It has even been confidently asserted, on the evidence of two very ancient jaws, found one in the cave of La Naulette, Belgium, the other in the Schipka cave, Moravia, that there was such a marked deficiency in the muscular attachment of the tongue that articulate speech could scarcely have been possible to the creature who had such an inferior maxillary. That there has been a positive advance on the structure of these early forms cannot indeed be denied.