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Hence in the genealogy of the mammals we must derive man immediately from the catarrhine group, and locate the origin of the human race in the Old World. Only the early root-form from which both descended was common to them.
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 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 apostles of Evolution tell us, that in the genealogical ages during which man has struggled upward, from the lower stages of vertebrate and mammal to the genus of catarrhine apes, he has gradually thrown off bestial instincts, and that the tiger taint will ultimately be totally eliminated; that "original sin is neither more nor less than the brute inheritance which every man carries with him, and that Evolution is an advance toward true salvation."
We must, therefore, consider the descent of man from other Catarrhines to be fully proved. Whatever further information on the comparative anatomy and ontogeny of the living Catarrhines we may obtain in the future, it cannot possibly disturb this conclusion. Naturally, our Catarrhine ancestors must have passed through a long series of different forms before the human type was produced.
John Fiske declares that man is descended from the catarrhine apes. Destiny of Man, p. 19. Professor Le Conte maintains that no existing animal could ever be developed into man. He traces all existing species up from a common stock, of which man is the head. The common line of ancestors are all extinct.
The Catarrhine and Platyrrhine monkeys agree in a multitude of characters, as is shewn 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.
The break between man and this Catarrhine monkey covers quite a series of links in the genetic vinculum; and yet between the two we find no high form of a low type fitting into a low form of a high type, as we manifestly should, to account for all the diversified changes that must have taken place in the interim.
Man, variability of; erroneously regarded as more domesticated than other animals; migrations of; wide distribution of; causes of the nakedness of; supposed physical inferiority of; a member of the Catarrhine group; early progenitors of; transition from ape indefinite; numerical proportions of the sexes in; difference between the sexes; proportion of sexes amongst the illegitimate; different complexion of male and female negroes; secondary sexual characters of; primeval condition of.
And just as lions, leopards, and lynxes different genera of the cat-family are descended from a common stock of carnivora, back to which we may also trace the pedigrees of dogs, hyænas, bears, and seals; so the various genera of platyrrhine and catarrhine apes, including Man, are doubtless descended from a common stock of primates, back to which we may also trace the converging pedigrees of monkeys and lemurs, until their ancestry becomes indistinguishable from that of rabbits and squirrels.
If she had selected only the fittest in respect to this old world stock of monkeys, the entire Catarrhine family should have disappeared in the next higher or fitter group a group nowhere to be found in geological distribution.
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