yet live in Madagascar and the southern part of Asia. From these
there branched off on the one side the platyrrhini, or apes with a flat
nose, on the new continent; on the other, the catarrhini, or apes with a
narrow nose, on the old. Among the ancestor of the last, he searches for
the common progenitors, from which again two branches started--on the one
hand the ignoble branches of the catarrhine species of apes, always
remaining lower in {44} development, to which also belong the
anthropomorphous apes, like the orang outang and gibbon in Asia, the
gorilla and chimpanzee in Africa; on the other hand, that branch which
represents the ascent of animals to man.

The refining agencies which finally raise the animal up to the man are
essentially the same that on the lowest scales of the pedigree have caused
the development of the lower organisms into the higher, namely: favorable
individual variations, inheritance, acclimatization, survival of the
fittest in the struggle for existence, natural, and especially, sexual
selection. These are, if not the exclusive, still the main agencies which
finally led the primate of the earthly creation upon the stage and
furnished him with his superior faculties. But it is particularly by means
of his social life, and of the forces which determine, transmit, increase
and ennoble the various impulses and instincts promoting it, that man has
become what he is. Through the need and faculty of reciprocal help, through
sexual selection--which of course is a very essential factor of social
life--there originated language, and reflection, and all the intellectual
qualities; and through these again originated the moral qualities, which
are most important in constituting the specific worth of man, and which
were finally developed into self-consciousness and free moral
responsibility.

But with the description of this attempt to explain more in detail these
specific characteristics of man, we leave the ground of pure natural
science and enter the region of philosophy, in which we have to take up the
{45} question again (in Book II, Ch. I) at the same point where we here
leave it.

Sec. 2. _The Followers of Darwin.--Ernst Haeckel._

Darwin's theory soon found an enthusiastic corps of followers--on the
continent, and especially in Germany, almost more than in his own country.
The outlook into an entirely new explanation of the origin of man, and the
probable use of this theory for attacks upon fait