At the same time, we can now reply to the often-repeated assertion, even heard from scientists of our own day, that the descent of man from the lower animals, and proximately from the apes, still needs to be “proved with certainty.” These “certain proofs” have been available for a long time; one has only to open one’s eyes to see them. It is a mistake to seek them in the discovery of intermediate forms between man and the ape, or the conversion of an ape into a human being by skilful education. The proofs lie in the great mass of empirical material we have already collected. They are furnished in the strongest form by the data of comparative anatomy and embryology, completed by paleontology. It is not a question now of detecting new proofs of the evolution of man, but of examining and understanding the proofs we already have.
I was almost alone thirty-six years ago when I made the first attempt, in my _General Morphology,_ to put organic science on a mechanical foundation through Darwin’s theory of descent. The association of ontogeny and phylogeny and the proof of the intimate causal connection between these two sections of the science of evolution, which I expounded in my work, met with the most spirited opposition on nearly all sides. The next ten years were a terrible “struggle for life” for the new theory. But for the last twenty-five years the tables have been turned. The phylogenetic method has met with so general a reception, and found so prolific a use in every branch of biology, that it seems superfluous to treat any further here of its validity and results. The proof of it lies in the whole morphological literature of the last three decades. But no other science has been so profoundly modified in its leading thoughts by this adoption, and been forced to yield such far-reaching consequences, as that science which I am now seeking to establish—monistic anthropogeny.
This statement may seem to be rather audacious, since the very next branch of biology, anthropology in the stricter sense, makes very little use of these results of anthropogeny, and sometimes expressly opposes them.[13] This applies especially to the attitude which has characterised the German Anthropological Society (the _Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Anthropologie_) for some thirty years. Its powerful president, the famous pathologist, Rudolph Virchow, is chiefly responsible for this. Until his death (September 5th, 1902) he never ceased to reject the theory of descent as unproven, and to ridicule its chief consequence—the descent of man from a series of mammal ancestors—as a fantastic dream. I need only recall his well-known expression at the Anthropological Congress at Vienna in 1894, that “it would be just as well to say man came from the sheep or the elephant as from the ape.”