Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/474

Rh toward the sea, and none can look forward and downward without forgetting the current of experience behind.

Biology and anthropology touch in the somatikos, which is held by both to be the product of organic development during eons past; yet one of the most patent facts of the organic world is the broad gap between man and the lower animals. True, the human skeleton so closely conforms to that of the apes that, according to Gill and others, no link was lacking even before the finding of Pithecanthropus; true, most of the muscles and tendons of man and the higher apes are homologous, while man retains vestigial structures manifestly inherited from simian ancestors; yet the great fact remains that even the lowest savage known to experience is human in attitude, mien, habits, and intelligence, while even the highest apes are but bristly beasts. It were bootless to deny or decry the chasm separating the always human biped from the always bestial quadrumane, since the chasm is the broadest in the whole domain of nature as seen by those who appreciate humanity in its fulness—it were better to face the chasm fairly and seek to bridge it squarely.

In attempting to define what may be called the humanization of the bimane, it is necessary to again question whether the extension of essentially biotic laws into anthropology has not been overdone. One of these is the law of the survival of the fittest, which indeed holds (within limits) for human activities and products, yet seems not to hold for man himself, who strives to reform rather than exterminate the weakly and the wicked; another is the biotic law of sexual selection, which can hardly hold in an assemblage of organisms all normally mating and leaving progeny, practically regardless of personal beauty or habit of mind—indeed it would appear that, in those communities in which the predominance of either sex renders a test possible, the most attractive individuals of the predominant sex are, on the average, the last mated and the least prolific. The apparent fail-