Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/475

Rh In examining this work, small as it is, we seem to discover, as it were, traces of collaboration. It has the appearance of having been written not by one Mr. Fiske, but by two Mr. Fiskes. The first is Mr. Fiske, the simple student of science and recorder of scientific facts; the second is an author who apparently can not rest content with facts as they are, but constantly strives to view them in the light of some foreign hypothesis. The second Mr. Fiske would appear to have edited the first rather than the first the second; yet the work has been done in such a way that the diverse elements can easily be distinguished and separated.

The scientific Mr. Fiske discourses thus: As the Copernican theory destroyed the notion that the earth was infinitely larger than all the heavenly bodies, and was the center of the universe, thus giving a violent shock to the theological beliefs of the period, so the Darwinian theory to-day has destroyed the notion, prevalent up to the present time, that man occupies a position wholly apart from the rest of the animal creation. It enables us to state that "man is not only a vertebrate, a mammal, and a primate, but [that] he belongs, as a genus, to the catarrhine family of apes"; further, that "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." There is no more reason for supposing that this conclusion will ever be overthrown than there is for supposing that the Copernican theory will be banished and the Ptolemaic restored. The facts which once furnished support to the "argument from design" have received at the hands of Mr. Darwin a very different interpretation. It is "that simple but wasteful process of survival of the fittest," which is now invoked to explain the marvels of adaptation with which Nature abounds. "The scientific Darwinian theory alleges development only as the result of certain rigorously defined agencies. The chief among these agencies is natural selection." A point, however, arrived, in the development of the brute ancestor of man, when psychical changes began to be of more use to him than physical changes; in other words, when better-developed brains began to have the advantage over better-developed muscles. From that point onward the brains of our progenitors steadily increased "through ages of ceaseless struggle," not only in size but in complexity of structure. So far, therefore, as man was concerned, "the process of zoölogical change had come to an end, and a process of psychological change was to take its place." A difference in kind was thus established between man and the lower animals, the result of the accumulation of differences of degree. In the same way we see a difference in kind established between a nebula and a solid sphere through the operation of a gradual process of cooling and contraction. Upon this point there should be no mistake, for it is thus that all differences