r inquiry that order of the placental
mammals to which we ourselves belong, and on which zoologists have
bestowed the very proper and distinguishing name of the Primates. Since
the days of Darwin there has been some tendency to resent the term
"lower animals," which man applies to his poorer relations. But, though
there is no such thing as an absolute standard by which we may judge the
"higher" or "lower" status of animals or plants, the extraordinary power
which man has by his brain development attained over both animate and
inanimate nature fully justifies the phrase. The Primate order is,
therefore, of supreme interest as the family that gave birth to man, and
it is important to discover the agencies which impelled some primitive
member of it to enter upon the path which led to this summit of organic
nature.

The order includes the femurs, a large and primitive family with
ape-like features--the Germans call them "half-apes"--the monkeys,
the man-like apes, and man. This classification according to structure
corresponds with the successive appearance of the various families in
the geological record. The femurs appear in the Eocene; the monkeys, and
afterwards the apes, in the Miocene, the first semi-human forms in the
Pleistocene, though they must have been developed before this. It is
hardly necessary to say that science does not regard man as a descendant
of the known anthropoid apes, or these as descended from the monkeys.
They are successive types or phases of development, diverging early from
each other. Just as the succeeding horse-types of the record are not
necessarily related to each other in a direct line, yet illustrate the
evolution of a type which culminates in the horse, so the spreading and
branching members of the Primate group illustrate the evolution of a
type of organism which culminates in man. The particular relationship of
the various families, living and dead, will need careful study.

That there is a general blood-relationship, and that man is much
more closely related to the anthropoid apes than to any of the lower
Primates, is no longer a matter of controversy. In Rudolph Virchow there
died, a few years ago, the last authoritative man of science to express
any doubt about it. There are, however, non-scientific writers who, by
repeating the ambiguous phrase that it is "only a theory," convey the
impression to inexpert readers that it is still more or less an open
question. We will therefore