Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/21

Rh upon the question of man's place in nature would no more think of introducing the subject to his readers in an argumentative way, than he would were he called upon to write about the atomic theory, the law of gravitation, or the form of the earth, for it is a fact far better established than any of these. Moreover, we can actually handle the material upon which the evidence is based, and the new evidence that is coming to light in ever-increasing masses as each day rolls by, brings but solid confirmation to science's verdict, not only as to the place occupied by man and mankind in nature, but exactly as to how he came to be there.

One can enter any public or private library today and pick the works of the time where he will, from schoolbook to lexicon, from fact to fiction: history has but one thing to say on this particular point any more. We find it tersely epitomized for us in the great dictionaries of the time, as for example in the Century Dictionary we find "man" defined as "a featherless plantigrade biped mammal of the genus Homo; Homo sapiens, a species of the family Hominidæ or Anthropidæ, order Primates, class Mammalia, of which there are several geographical races or varieties:" (Vol. V., p. 3601). There is no question of what is meant by this definition, and again, in the same authoritative work, we find Hominidce defined in the following words, to wit: — "A family of mammals, represented by the single genus Homo, man, of the suborder Anthropoidca and order Primates; mankind. It is characterized by the complete withdrawal of the fore-limbs from the office of locomotion, and consequently the habitually erect attitude except in infancy; the perfection of the hand as a

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