Evolution : popular lectures before the Brooklyn Ethical Association.

Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Evolution : popular lectures before the Brooklyn Ethical Association. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    there is the fact that a certain monkey, after getting badly drunk, and having an outrageous headache, would never again touch the liquor that occasioned his discomfiture. The processes of reproduction, the differences of male and female, closely correspond in man and other mammals. The argument from embryology I have detailed already. By it- self it ought to be conclusive to any candid mind. The ex- istence of certain rudimentary parts and organs in man I have also mentioned incidentally already. These rudiment- ary parts and organs are considerably many. The coccygeal bone is the most significant. “ Thereby hangs a tail,” late in the pre-natal period. A comparison of the mental powers of man with those of the lower animals is confirmatory of his relationship with them. Even his moral qualities are anticipated in some slight degree by them. They are ca- pable of jealousy, of fear, of love, of emulation, of shame, of pride, of magnanimity—as when a great dog scorns the snarling of a little one. The moral sense has its beginnings in the social tendencies of the lower animals. The more so- cial instincts are selected and made permanent because they are for the good of those who cherish them. Endeavoring to trace the genealogy of man, Darwin de- clares his next of kin to be the catarrhine or Old World monkeys. But we must not, he says, fall into the error of supposing that the early progenitor of the whole Simian stock, including Man, was identical with, or even close- ly resembled, any existing ape or monkey. The five great vertebrate classes,— mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fishes,— are all, says Darwin, descended from some one prototype,—probably, as fishes are the most lowly organized, from some very ancient and fish-like animal akin to and near- ly resembling our present ascidians, a class of invertebrate, hermaphrodite, marine creatures permanently attached to a support. It is contended that the original group diverged into two great branches —“ the one retrograding in development and producing the present class of ascidians, the other ris- ing to the crown and summit of the animal kingdom.” The volumes that contained the chapters on the “ Descent of Man ” also contained five or six hundred pages on sexual selection — an expansion of two or three pages in the “ Or- igin of Species.” Of all that Darwin wrote, these five or six hundred pages are the most delightful reading. But at the time of their appearance their interest was not a little