Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/184

172 interior evolution. There is a gradation in the arboreal life of monkeys. The American monkeys and the semnopithecoids do not leave their trees; the magots frequently come to the ground, and are only half tree-dwellers; while the macacus and cynocephalus are ground-dwellers. It is not allowable for us to believe, in view of their perfect adaptation to life on trees, that the magots, and, with stronger reason, the macacuses and cynocephaluses, correspond to an effort in a new direction—a direction by continuing in which we could conceive that they might eventually raise themselves again to an intermittent oblique attitude, and thus favor new adaptations.

Gratiolet, at a time when he could hardly dream of the doctrine of evolution, from which, moreover, his religious sentiments removed him, conceived the idea of parallel series among the monkeys of our continent, leading, for example, from the semnopithecus, peculiar to Southern Asia and the neighboring islands, to the gibbon and the orang in the same region; from the macacus and magot to the chimpanzee; and from the cynocephalus to the gorilla. Without suspecting it, Gratiolet was preparing for the doctrine of the derivation of man from the monkey, and was associating himself with the polygenist ideas then in favor in the anti-orthodox school.

This leads us to our last genealogical stage—the passage from the monkey to man. I begin by describing the principal opinions on the subject that have been in vogue or that may be sustained. In the theory of M. Haeckel, who is monogenist for man as he is monophyllitic for the other branches of his genealogical tree, the tailless monkeys of the Old Continent constitute the nineteenth stage from the monera. They are divided into four branches, the fourth of which is that of the anthropoids; and this is separated into African and Asiatic branches, the latter of which is divided in turn into three; the third of which gives the Pithecanthropus, or man-ape, which has already a vertical position, but is without speech. It is his twenty-first stage, the anthropopithecus of M. de Mortillet, from which living man, the twenty-second and last stage of M. Haeckel, is derived by two branches—one for the woolly-haired negroes, and the other for the straight-haired races, of which the Australian was the prototype. The place where man was thus originated by the acquisition of articulate language is fixed on M. Haeckel's map to the southwest of India, where the hypothetical lemurian continent may have been. The spot is marked Paradise, and is the point of departure whence men have scattered in every direction—some west to Africa, others east to Australasia and Melanesia, others north to Europe and Asia, and thence by Bering Strait to America.