This genealogy is wrong throughout, and is founded on a material error.
Indeed, Hæckel bases his descent of man on the seventeenth and eighteenth stages, the Marsupialia and Prosimiæ—(genus Hæckelii?). Applying the latter term to the Lemuridæ—hence making of them animals with a placenta—he commits a zoological blunder. For after [pg 706] having himself divided mammals according to their anatomical differences into two groups—the indeciduata, which have no decidua (or special membrane uniting the placentæ), and the deciduata, those who possess it—he includes the Prosimiæ in the latter group. Now we have shown elsewhere what other men of Science had to say to this. As de Quatrefages says:
The anatomical investigations of ... Milne Edwards and Grandidier upon the animals ... place it beyond all doubt that the Prosimiæ of Hæckel have no decidua and a diffuse placenta. They are indeciduata. Far from any possibility of their being the ancestors of the apes, according to the principles laid down by Hæckel himself, they cannot even be regarded as the ancestors of the zonoplacental mammals ... and ought to be connected with the Pachydermata, the Edentata, and the Cetacea.[1594]
And yet Hæckel's inventions pass with some as exact Science!
The above mistake, if indeed it be one, is not even hinted at in Hæckel's Pedigree of Man, translated by Aveling. If the excuse may stand good that at the time the famous “genealogies” were made, “the embryogenesis of the Prosimiæ was not known,” it is familiar now. We shall see whether the next edition of Aveling's translation will have this important error rectified, or if the seventeenth and eighteenth stages will remain as they are to blind the profane, as one of the real intermediate links. But, as the French Naturalist observes:
Their [Darwin's and Hæckel's] process is always the same, considering the unknown as a proof in favour of their theory.
It comes to this. Grant to man an immortal Spirit and Soul; endow the whole animate and inanimate creation with the monadic principle gradually evolving from latent and passive into active and positive polarity—and Hæckel will not have a leg to stand upon, whatever his admirers may say.
But there are important divergencies even between Darwin and Hæckel. While the former makes us proceed from the tailed catarrhine, Hæckel traces our hypothetical ancestor to the tailless ape, though, at the same time, he places him in a hypothetical “stage” immediately preceding this—Menocerca with tails (nineteenth stage).
Nevertheless, we have one thing in common with the Darwinian school, that is the law of gradual and extremely slow Evolution, embracing many million years. The chief quarrel, it appears, is with regard to the nature of the primitive “ancestor.” We shall be told that the Dhyân Chohan, or the “progenitor” of Manu, is a hypothetical [pg 707] being unknown on the physical plane. We reply that it was believed in by the whole of Antiquity, and is by nine-tenths of the present humanity; whereas not only is the pithecoid man, or ape-man, a purely hypothetical creature of Hæckel's creation, unknown and untraceable on this Earth, but further its genealogy—as invented by him—clashes with scientific facts and all the known data of modern discovery in Zoology. It is simply absurd, even as a fiction. As de Quatrefages demonstrates in a few words, Hæckel “admits the existence of an absolutely theoretical pithecoid man”—a hundred times more difficult to accept than any Deva ancestor. And it is not the only instance in which he proceeds in a similar manner in order to complete his genealogical table. In fact he very naïvely admits his inventions himself. Does he not confess the non-existence of his Sozura (fourteenth stage)—a creature entirely unknown to Science—by confessing over his own signature, that:
The proof of its existence arises from the necessity of an intermediate type between the thirteenth and the fourteenth stages[!].