man were a series of tertiary primates, and the next nearest were the anthropoid apes, the anthropomorphous catarrhines. The careful critical comparisons which the two zoologists, Paul and Fritz Sarasin, have accomplished in their fine work. Researches in Ceylon (1893) shows that the Veddahs of to-day, the dwarfish aborigines of Ceylon, approach nearest to the anthropoid apes in the primitive relations of their bodily structure, and that among the latter the chimpanzee on the one side and the gorilla on the other stand nearest to man. The gibbon again, as a lower and less specialized form, shows the closest agreement with the common miocene ancestors of all the Anthropomorpha. This direct family relationship is much clearer and easier to settle than that of any other mammal. Far more obscure and enigmatical is, for example, that of the elephants, the sirenia, the cetacea, the edentates (armadillos and pangolins) in both hemispheres. Not only in his pentadactylate hands and feet, but also in other anatomical features does man show the characteristic inherited features of his stock more clearly than many other mammals, as, for example, ungulates, cetaceans, and bats.
The immeasurable significance which this secure knowledge of the primate origin of man possesses for the entire range of human science lies clear before the eyes of every unprejudiced and logical thinker. No one among the philosophers has more thoroughly based his authoritative influence upon a contemplation of the entire universe than has the great English thinker Herbert Spencer, one of the few learned men of the present day who unites the most profound scientific training with the deepest philosophical speculation. Spencer belongs to those older nature philosophers who already before Darwin recognized in the monistic theory of evolution the magic key which would unlock the riddle of the world. He belongs also to those evolutionists who justly lay the greatest stress upon progressive inheritance, upon the "transmission of acquired characters." Like myself, Spencer has, from the beginning, fought in the most resolute manner the germ-plasm theory of Weismann, which denies the most important factor in the theory of descent and wishes to explain the same chiefly through the omnipotence of natural selection.
In England the theory of Weismann has been received with much approval, and is also known as neo-Darwinism, in opposition to older views which are known as neo-Lamarckism. This designation is entirely incorrect, for Charles Darwin was just as firmly convinced of the fundamental significance of progressive inheritance as was his great predecessor Jean Lamarck and as is Herbert Spencer.
I had three times the pleasure of visiting Darwin at Down, and each time we discussed this important question upon which we completely agreed. I share the conviction of Herbert Spencer that progressive inheritance is an indispensable factor of the monistic theory of evolution and one of its most important elements. To deny it, as Weismann does, is to fly to mysticism, and it is better to accept the mysterious
