Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/461

Rh of the tripod upon which rests the doctrine of human evolution. While opinions differ with respect to the remains of man taken from the many caves and mounds of Europe and America, there is but one generally accepted view regarding the ape-man Pithecanthropus of the Javan rocks. The remains of this animal prove among other things that its brain was intermediate between the average ape brain and the average human brain, that the animal was indeed an ape-man and nothing else.

Science holds, furthermore, that natural factors alone have brought about human evolution. While it is true that the explanation is no more complete for this special instance than it is for animals in general, yet the human species is not exempt from the control of the known factors, like those which cause variation or govern inheritance. Indeed, some of the significant facts of heredity have been first made out in the human species. Can we doubt the reality of selection and the struggle for existence when scores perish annually in the conflict with extreme degrees of temperature and other environmental forces, when as a result of the unceasing combat with bacterial enemies alone the casualties on the human side number in our country more than a hundred thousand annually?

To the zoologist it seems strange that there is so much opposition to the doctrine of human evolution. In truth he finds this to be proportional to misunderstanding of the facts, for when the evidence is produced—Pelion piled on Ossa—any lingering doubts the observer might have are crushed by an irresistible weight of testimony. After all, our kind is but one of the many hundreds of thousands of living species; and viewing the matter from the calm, impersonal standpoint of scientific study, the fact that he is himself a human being does not distort the investigator's vision, for his perspective is corrected and rectified by the instruments of scientific method. He finds no difficulty in accepting human evolution as a scientific fact—that is, true as far as science goes.

In extending its broad comparative studies into the field of complex and intricate human nature, zoology touches numerous other sciences that might seem at first sight to be entirely independent, or at the most only casually connected with it. I shall venture to point out where analysis within the field of zoology has produced results which have a high and immediate value for students of anthropology, psychology, sociology and ethics.

When they deal with the evolution of the human species from prehuman animals, the anthropologist and the zoologist are brought by their similar interest upon common ground; and when they pass on to explore the field of human diversity where lie the complex problems