long was answered
only with an hypothesis, but which Professor Haeckel to-day professes
to be able to answer with a decisive and affirmative citation not of
theories but of facts. In a word, it is claimed that man's immediate
ancestor is now actually upon record, that the much-heralded "missing
link" is missing no longer. The principal single document, so to
speak, on which this claim is based consists of the now famous skull and
thigh-bone which the Dutch surgeon, Dr. Eugene Dubois, discovered in the
year 1891 in the tertiary strata of the island of Java. Tertiary strata,
it should be explained, had never hitherto yielded any fossils bordering
on the human type, but this now famous skeleton was unmistakably akin
to the human. The thigh in particular, taken by itself, would have
been pronounced by any competent anatomist to be of human origin.
Unquestionably the individual who bore it had been accustomed to take
an erect attitude in walking. And yet the skull was far inferior in size
and shape to that of any existing tribe of man--was, indeed, rather of
a simian type, though, on the other hand, of about twice the capacity
of any existing ape. In a word, it seemed clear that the creature whose
part skeleton had been found by Dr. Dubois was of a type intermediate
between the lowest existing man and the highest existing man-apes. It
was, in short, the actual prototype of that hypothetical creature which
Haeckel, in his genealogical tree, had christened _pithecanthropus_, the
ape-man. As such it was christened _Pithecanthropus erectus_, the erect
ape-man.

Now the discovery of this remarkable form did not make Professor Haeckel
any more certain that some such form had existed than he was thirty
years before when he christened a hypothetical subject with the title
now taken by a tangible claimant. But, after all, there is something
very taking about a prophecy fulfilled, and so the appearance of
_Pithecanthropus erectus_ created no small sensation in the zoological
world. He was hailed by Haeckel and his followers as the veritable
"missing link," and as such gained immediate notoriety. But, on the
other hand, a reactionary party at once attacked him with the most
bitter animadversions, denouncing him as no true ancestor of man with
a bitterness that is hard to understand, considering that the origin of
man from _some_ lower form has long ceased to be matter of controversy.
"_Pithecanthropus_ is at least half an ape," they cr