y have withheld his
mockery of all these grave phylogenetic studies as "personal
crotchets" and worthless dreams.

What mighty strides towards a mechanical morphology we have made by
this phylogenetic working out of the system, and how much light and
life it has at once thrown into the system that before was dead and
cold, can only be known to those who have long and deeply studied
specific systematisation and the grouping of species; Virchow has not
the remotest suspicion of it. Moreover, these attempts have now
proceeded so far, that a large proportion of the phylogenetic
hypotheses are regarded as very nearly certain, and can hardly
undergo any further essential modifications; while the greater number
of them are still in an unfixed state, and one systematist tries to
improve them in this direction, and another in that.

The following phylogenetic hypotheses are held to be almost
certain:----The descent of many-celled animals from single-celled, of
the Medusae from the hydroid Polyps, of the jointed from the unjointed
worms, of the sucking from the gnawing insects, of amphibious animals
from fishes, of birds from reptiles, of the placental mammalia from
the marsupials, and so forth. I personally consider the descent of man
from the apes as equally certain; nay, I regard this most important
and pregnant genealogical hypothesis as one of those which, up to the
present time, rest on the best empirical basis.

Huxley, in particular, fifteen years ago, in his celebrated "Man's
Place in Nature," 1863, so admirably proved the undoubted "descent of
man from apes," and so clearly discussed all the relations that had to
be taken into consideration, that very little was left to others to
do. The result of his comparative morphological investigations is
contained in this proposition----" If we take up a system of organs,
be it which we will, the comparison of its modifications throughout
the series of apes leads us to the same conclusion: that in every
single visible character man differs less from the higher apes than
these do from the lower members of the same order." It is therefore
impossible for any objective zoologist, according to the principles of
comparative systematisation, to ascribe to man any other place in the
animal world than in the order of apes; and it is quite immaterial
whether we designate this individual group as the Order of Apes, or,
with Linnaeus, as the Primates. For the phylogenetic construction of