f the new zoology, was, as I have already
intimated, Professor Haeckel. His hypothetical tree of man's lineage,
tracing the ancestry of the human family back to the earliest geological
times and the lowest orders of beings, has been familiar now for just
a third of a century. It was at first confessedly only a tentative
genealogy, with many weak limbs and untraced branches. It was perfected
from time to time, as new data came to hand, through studies of
paleontology, of embryology, and of comparative anatomy. It will be of
interest, then, to inquire just what is its status today and to examine
briefly Professor Haeckel's own most recent pronouncement regarding it.

Perhaps it is not worth our while here to go too far down towards the
root of the genealogical tree to begin our inquiry. So long as it is
admitted that the remote ancestry is grounded in the lowest forms of
organisms, it perhaps does not greatly matter to the average reader that
there are dark places in the lineage during the period when our ancestor
had not yet developed a spinal column--when, in other words, he had not
attained the dignity of the lowest fish. Neither, perhaps, need we
mourn greatly that the exact branch by which our reptilian or amphibian
non-mammalian ancestor became the first and most primitive of mammals is
still hidden in unexplored recesses of early strata. The most patrician
monarch of to-day would not be greatly disturbed as to just who were his
ancestors of the days of the cave-dweller. It is when we come a little
nearer home that the question begins to take on its seemingly personal
significance. Questions of grandparents and great-grandparents concern
the patrician very closely. And so all along, the question that has
interested the average casual investigator of the Darwinian theory
has been the question as to man's immediate ancestor--the parents and
grandparents of our race, so to speak. Hence the linking of the word
"monkey" with the phrase "Darwinian theory" in the popular mind; and
hence, also, the interpretation of the phrase "missing link" in relation
to man's ancestry, as applying only to our ancestor and not to any other
of the gaps in the genealogical chain.

What, then, is the present status of Haeckel's genealogical tree
regarding man's most direct ancestor? Prom what non-human parent did the
human race directly spring? That is a question that has proved itself of
lasting, vital human interest. It is a question that