h devoted by these "exact skull measurers" to
the study of Gegenbaur's theory of the skull, and to testing the
hypothesis by the skulls of Selachians, would have yielded them more
fruit and have given them more light than long years of describing and
measuring human skulls, however various.

Virchow himself affords the most striking example of the usual results
of this so-called "exact method" of studying skulls. In his popular
essay on "The Skulls of Men and Apes," 1870, he concludes with this
notable proposition:--"It is therefore self-evident that Man can never
by any progressive development have originated from the Apes." Every
evolutionist who is familiar with the surprising facts of comparative
morphology will draw from them the opposite conclusion: "It is
self-evident that Man could only have originated from the progressive
development of the Ape (organism)."

This brings us to that question which, in the popular treatment of the
theory of descent, is justly considered as its most important outcome
and as the keystone of the evolutionist edifice--to the well-known
proposition, "Man is descended from the Ape." While we simply ignore
all the misrepresentation, distortion, and misinterpretation which
this ape, or pithecoid hypothesis, has met with on all sides, we will
only remark that this fundamental proposition, in the sense of our
modern doctrine of evolution, can rationally have only this plain
meaning: that the human species as a whole was long since developed
from the order of apes, indeed actually from one (or perhaps more)
long since extinct form of ape; the immediate progenitors of man in
the long series of his vertebrate ancestry were apes or ape-like
animals. Of course none of the now surviving species of apes is to be
regarded as the unaltered posterity of that primeval parent-form.
Virchow, however, understanding the "ape question" in this sense,
answers it, as Bastian also does, with the most positive
contradiction. "We cannot teach the doctrine that man is descended
from apes or from any other animal, for we cannot regard it as a real
acquisition of science" (p. 31). Although I myself, in direct
opposition to this view, and in agreement with almost all my
professional colleagues, look upon the descent of man from apes as one
of the surest of phylogenetic hypotheses, I will here expressly admit
that the _relative_ certainty of this, as of all other historical
hypotheses of descent, is not comparable