Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/209

Rh and the offspring of one becomes of no greater interest than those of a stranger, "and in general the duration of the feelings which insure the protection of the offspring is determined by the duration of the infancy. . ..

"Hence if long infancies could have suddenly come into existence among a primitive race of ape-like men, the race would have quickly perished from inadequate persistence of parental affection." Prof. Fiske, in a most reasonable way, shows that "the prolonged helplessness of the offspring must keep the parents together for longer and longer periods in successive epochs; and when at last the association is so long kept up that the older children are growing mature while the younger ones still need protection, the family relations begin to become permanent. The parents have lived so long in company that to seek new companionships involves some disturbance of ingrained habits, and meanwhile the older sons are more likely to continue their original association with each other than to establish associations with strangers, since they have common objects to achieve, and common enmities bequeathed, inherited or acquired with neighboring families."

In his chapter on the moral genesis of man Fiske maintains that "the prolongation of human infancy accompanying the development of intelligence, and the correlative extension of parental feeling, are facts established by observation wherever observation is possible; and to maintain that the correlation of these phenomena was kept up during an epoch which is hidden from observation, and can only be known by inference, is to make a genuine induction, involving no other assumption than that the operations of Nature are uniform. To him who is still capable of believing that the human race was created by miracle in a single day, with all its attributes, physical and psychical, compounded and proportioned, just as they now are, the present inquiry is of course devoid of significance. But for the evolutionist there would seem to be no alternative but to accept, when once propounded, the present series of inferences."

Recalling now the various evidences educed by Wyman, Giman, and others, regarding the anomalous characters of the remains of primitive man, it seems impossible that a mind unbiased by preconceived opinion should be able to resist the conviction as to man's lowly origin.

If we take into account the rapidly-accumulating data of European naturalists concerning primitive man, with the mass of evidence received in these notes, we find an array of facts which irresistibly point to a common origin with animals directly below us, and these evidences are found in the massive skulls with coarse ridges for muscular attachments, the rounding of the base of the nostrils, the early ossification of the nasal bones, the small cranial capacity in certain forms, the prominence of the frontal crest, the posterior position of