had been examined by a naturalist,
would have been classed amongst the Quadrumana, as surely as the still
more ancient progenitor of the Old and New World monkeys."

These clear and definite lines leave no doubt that Darwin--so critical
and cautious in regard to important conclusions--was quite as firmly
convinced of the descent of man from the apes (the Catarrhinae, in
particular) as Lamarck was in 1809 and Huxley in 1863.

It is to be noted particularly that, in these and other observations
on the subject, Darwin decidedly assumes the monophyletic origin of
the mammals, including man. It is my own conviction that this is of the
greatest importance. A number of difficult questions in regard to the
development of man, in respect of anatomy, physiology, psychology,
and embryology, are easily settled if we do not merely extend our
progonotaxis to our nearest relatives, the anthropoid apes and the
tailed monkeys from which these have descended, but go further back and
find an ancestor in the group of the Lemuridae, and still further back
to the Marsupials and Monotremata. The essential identity of all the
Mammals in point of anatomical structure and embryonic development--in
spite of their astonishing differences in external appearance and habits
of life--is so palpably significant that modern zoologists are agreed
in the hypothesis that they have all sprung from a common root, and that
this root may be sought in the earlier Palaeozoic Amphibia.

The fundamental importance of this comparative morphology of the
Mammals, as a sound basis of scientific anthropology, was recognised
just before the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Lamarck first
emphasised (1794) the division of the animal kingdom into Vertebrates
and Invertebrates. Even thirteen years earlier (1781), when Goethe made
a close study of the mammal skeleton in the Anatomical Institute at
Jena, he was intensely interested to find that the composition of the
skull was the same in man as in the other mammals. His discovery of the
os intermaxillare in man (1784), which was contradicted by most of
the anatomists of the time, and his ingenious "vertebral theory of
the skull," were the splendid fruit of his morphological studies. They
remind us how Germany's greatest philosopher and poet was for many years
ardently absorbed in the comparative anatomy of man and the mammals, and
how he divined that their wonderful identity in structure was no mere
superficial r