Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/510

492 Now, the so-called anthropoids or large manlike apes may be seen either dead or alive in many museums and zoölogical gardens.

—Closely connected with zoölogy is biology, or the science of life, which undoubtedly has achieved the greatest progress made by physical science in the century by the promulgation and victory of the theory of descent by evolution, a theory brought forward by Darwin in 1860, and developed by Haeckel and others. Nearly related to it are the above-mentioned remarkable discoveries in the domain of paleontology and the knowledge of numerous intermediate forms which formerly had been disregarded as unimportant "varieties."

—The existence of the fossil man, which had been doubted so long, has been proved, and the geological age of the human race established. The series of discoveries coming under this head was opened in the years 1830-'40 by the discovery, made by the French scientist Boucher de Perthes, of man-made diluvial flint axes in the Somme Valley in the north of France. Since then the researches concerning the age and the preliminary history of mankind have become the favorite study of the time and of scholars, and there has come into being within a comparatively short time a literature on this subject the wealth of which can hrdlyhardly [sic] be surveyed. The discoveries in this vast and interesting domain are accumulating from year to year to such an extent as to give rise to a new and successful science of archæology. While on the one hand this science teaches us that the existence of man on earth must be shifted back into hoary ages to which the historical period can not be compared at all, it shows us, on the other hand, that this period considered geologically—i. e., when compared with the periods of evolution of the earth—is of itself a very recent and new one. It is for this reason that the origin of man must be regarded as the crowning or culminating point of the whole organic evolution—a point beyond which the development of the world was no longer carried on by Nature, but by man. A highly desirable completion of these studies on the primal history of the human race was supplied by the great progress in ethnology made possible by the enormous traveling facilities of our century.

—Closely related to anthropology is psychology, as to which the conviction prevails in authoritative circles that it should not be classed with the philosophical sciences, but with the physical; or at least that it must be treated after the physical method if any tangible result is to be attained. It was this mode of treatment that achieved the afore-mentioned result of the measurement of the duration of human thought. We owe also to this method the better knowledge of the animal soul and the foundation for