-day
would to all certainty make use of the same general methods. The chief
differences, perhaps, that would be made are two: First, greater
stress would be laid on the distinction, first made by Huxley himself,
between intermediate and linear types. (See p. 87). To use the popular
phrase, a great deal of water has passed under the bridges since the
separation of man from the ape-like progenitors common to him and to
the existing anthropoids. It has already been pointed out that the
gradual extinction of lower races of man is widening the apparent gap
between existing man and existing apes; and evidence accumulates that
many still more primitive and more ape-like races of man than the
lowest existing savages have disappeared from the surface of the
earth. Moreover, we know that existing anthropoids are the degenerate
and scattered remnants of what was once a much more widely spread and
more important group. We have some reason for believing the contrary,
and no reason for believing that the surviving anthropoids represent
the most man-like apes that have lived.

The second great point in which a modern writer would amend Huxley's
statement of the case is more purely anatomical. One result of
Darwin's work has been that anatomists attend much more closely to the
slight variations of anatomical structure to be found among
individuals of the same species. A comparison between an individual
human body and the body of an individual gorilla is not now considered
sufficient. The comparison must be made between the results of
dissection of a very large number of men and of a very large number of
gorillas. The anatomy of a type is not the anatomy of an individual;
it is a kind of central point around which there oscillate the
variations presented by the individuals belonging to the type. So far
as this newer method has been applied, it has been found that the
variations of the gorilla type frequently, in the case of individual
organs, overlap the variations of the human type, and that the
structure of man differs from the structure of any anthropoid type
only in that the abstract central point of its variations is slightly
different from the abstract central point of the variations presented
by individual orangs, gorillas, and chimpanzees.

CHAPTER X

SCIENCE AS A BRANCH OF EDUCATION

Science-Teaching Fifty Years Ago--Huxley's Insistence on
Reform--Science Primers--Physiography--Elementary
Physiology--