f Agassiz (_Principles of Zoology_, pp.
205-206), that "there is a manifest progress in the succession of beings
on the surface of the earth. This progress consists in an increasing
similarity of the living fauna, and, among the vertebrates especially,
in their increasing resemblance to man." Agassiz continues, however, in
terms characteristic of the creationist school: "But this connexion is
not the consequence of a direct lineage between the faunas of different
ages. There is nothing like parental descent connecting them. The fishes
of the Palaeozoic age are in no respect the ancestors of the reptiles of
the Secondary age, nor does man descend from the mammals which preceded
him in the Tertiary age. The link by which they are connected is of a
higher and immaterial nature; and their connexion is to be sought in the
view of the Creator himself, whose aim in forming the earth, in allowing
it to undergo the successive changes which geology has pointed out, and
in creating successively all the different types of animals which have
passed away, was to introduce man upon the surface of our globe. Man is
the end towards which all the animal creation has tended from the first
appearance of the first Palaeozoic fishes." The evolutionist, on the
contrary (see EVOLUTION), maintains that different successive species of
animals are in fact connected by parental descent, having become
modified in the course of successive generations. The result of Charles
Darwin's application of this theory to man may be given in his own words
(_Descent of Man_, part i. ch. 6):--

"The Catarhine and Platyrhine monkeys agree in a multitude of
characters, as is shown by their unquestionably belonging to one and
the same order. The many characters which they possess in common can
hardly have been independently acquired by so many distinct species;
so that these characters must have been inherited. But an ancient form
which possessed many characters common to the Catarhine and Platyrhine
monkeys, and others in an intermediate condition, and some few perhaps
distinct from those now present in either group, would undoubtedly
have been ranked, if seen by a naturalist, as an ape or a monkey. And
as man under a genealogical point of view belongs to the Catarhine or
Old World stock, we must conclude, however much the conclusion may
revolt our pride, that our early progenitors would have been properly
thus designated. But we must not