Page:The World's Most Famous Court Trial - 1925.djvu/276

272 of all men living today, evolution must have gone on at an extremely rapid rate in order to have produced so many widely different races, for there could scarcely have been more than 120 generations in that time. If species are believed to be immutable it is difficult to understand why man should be such a diversified group as he is.

The methods of classifying animals just outlined depend upon relatively gross criteria (homologies) as compared with the refinements characteristic of the serological technique used in blood testing. This latter method of classifying animals depends upon chemical similarities and differences in the bloods of various animals, and the basic assumption is once more that degrees of resemblance parallel degrees of blood relationship. Recent investigation has shown that certain materials in an animal's blood are even more sharply specific than are its visible structural characteristics. Chemical tests of extreme delicacy are used to reveal resemblances in blood. Thus, if we wish to find out what animals are most like man in blood composition we can find it out in the following manner: Human blood is drawn and allowed to clot, a process that separates the solid materials in the blood from the liquid serum. The latter watery fluid contains the specific human blood ingredients. Small doses of it are injected at two-day intervals into the blood vessels of a rabbit. At first the rabbit is sickened by the injection, thus showing a marked reaction to: the foreign material. In the course of a short time, however, there is no further reaction, and we may conclude that the rabbit is immunized. What has happened is that some substance has been developed in the rabbit's blood which neutralizes the toxic effects of human blood, It is a sort of antitoxin and may be spoken of as antihuman serum, a material that may now be used as a delicate indicator of blood kinship. When this antihuman serum is mixed with serum taken from the blood of any human being an immediate and definite white precipitate is formed; when mixed with that of any of the anthropoid apes the precipitate is similar to that formed with human serum, but less abundant and somewhat slower in appearing. The tests showed a less prompt and less abundant reaction with the blood of old world monkeys, a slight but definite reaction with that of new world monkeys, and no noticeable reaction with that of lemurs.

The tests further indicated that if strong enough solutions are used and time enough allowed for the precipitate to settle, there is an unmistakable blood relationship among all mammals and that degrees of relationship run closely parallel with those based upon homologies. Not only this, but not a few affinities, the existence of which had been only vaguely suggested by comparative anatomy, are strongly emphasized by blood tests. One most remarkable revelation is that whales, the most specialized among mammals, are more closely related to the ungulates (hoofed animals), and especially to the swine family, than to any other group of the class mammalia—a diagnosis that had previously been made by several anatomists on what appeared to be rather slender morphological grounds.

At the present time the technique of blood testing for animal affinities is rather difficult and very few workers have attempted to make use of it. The results so far attained, however, are so definite and clean-cut that there is every reason to expect a great future for this new type of evolutionary evidence. Many groups of animals have already been tested and in general the affinities indicated closely parallel those based on homologies. There is, however, no exactness about this parallel; nor could we expect such to be the case. For that matter there is no exact parallelism between the teeth and the feet, between the head and the tail. No two systems of an organism exactly keep pace in their evolution; one may remain