lace, we may look to nature for fossil evidence
regarding the ancestry of our species. Much is known about the remains of
many kinds of men who lived in prehistoric times, but we need consider
here only one form which lived long before the glacial period in the
so-called Tertiary times. In 1894 a scientist named Dubois discovered in
Java some of the remains of an animal which was partly ape and partly man.
So well did these remains exhibit the characters of Haeckel's hypothetical
ape-man, _Pithecanthropus_, that the name fitted the creature like a
glove. Specifically, the cranium presents an arch which is intermediate
between that of the average ape and of the lowest human beings. It
possessed protruding brows like those of the gorilla. The estimated brain
capacity was about one thousand cubic centimeters, four hundred more than
that of any known ape, and much less than the average of the lower human
races. Even without other characters, these would indicate that the animal
was actually a "missing link" in the scientific sense,--that is, a form
which is near the common progenitors of the modern species of apes and of
man. We would not expect to find a missing link that was actually
intermediate in all respects between modern apes and modern men, any more
than we should look for actual connecting bands of tissue between any two
leaves upon a tree. A missing link, in the true sense, is like a bud of
earlier years which stood near the point from which two twigs of the
present day now diverge. So _Pithecanthropus_ is a part of the chain
leading to man, not far from the place where the human line sprang from a
lower primate ancestor.

Of the fossil remains of true prehistoric men, little need be said. We
cannot know whether the races now living in the regions where these
remains are found are really the descendants of the older types, and so a
direct comparison cannot be made. It is true that the brain capacities of
the man of Spy, of the Neanderthal, and of the English caverns are lower
than those of modern civilized races, but the differences are not so
striking and not so clearly indicative of the apelike ancestor of man as
in the case of the previous comparison of _Pithecanthropus_ with apes and
men.

* * * * *

The foregoing facts illustrate the conclusive evidence brought forward by
science that human evolution in physical respects is true. Even if we
wished to do so, we cannot do away