Happy, privileged man! Hapless evolution-forsaken baboon! We are not told by science the secret why, while man has had plenty of time to become, say a Plato, a Newton, a Napoleon, or even a Haeckel, his poor ancestor should have been arrested in his growth and development. For, as far as is known, the rump of the cynocephalus seems as blue and as callous to-day, as it was during the reign of Psammetichus or Cheops; the macacus must have made as ugly faces at Pliny 18 centuries back, as he does now at a Darwinian. We may be told that in the enormous period of time that must have elapsed since the beginning of evolution, 2,000, or even 10,000, years mean very little. But then, one does not find even the Moneron any better off for the millions of years that have rolled away. Yet, between the gelatinous and thoughtful hermit of the briny deep and man, there must have elapsed quite sufficient time for some trifling transformation. That primordial protoplasmic creature, however, seems to fare no better at the hands of evolution, which has well-nigh forgotten it.
By this time, one would suppose that this ancestor of ours of stage one, ought to have reached, to say the least, a higher development: to have become, for instance, the amphibian “sozura” of the “fourteenth stage,” so minutely and scientifically described by Mr. Haeckel, and of which De Quatrefages so wickedly says in “The Human Species” (p. 108), that “it (the sozura) is equally unknown to science.” But we see quite the reverse. This tender-bodied little one, has remained but a moneron to this very hour: so much so, that Mr. Huxley, fishing him out from the abysmal ocean depths, took pity upon him, and gave him a father. He baptized our archaic ancestor, and named him Bathybius Haeckelii....
But all these are mysteries that will, no doubt, be easily explained to the full satisfaction—of science, by any biologist of Haeckel’s brain power. As all know, no acrobatic feats, from the top of one tree to another top, by the swiftest of chimpanzees, can ever approach, let alone equal, the rapid evolutions of fancy in his cerebral “officina,” whenever Haeckel is called upon to explain the inexplicable....
There is one trifle, however, which seems to have the best of even his capacity for getting out of a scientific dilemma, and this is the eighteenth stage of his genealogy, in the “Pedigree of Man.” Man’s evolution from the Monera, alias Bathybius Haeckelii, up to tailed and then tailless man, passes through the marsupials, the kangaroo, sarrigue, etc. Thus he writes:—
“Eighteenth stage. Prosimiæ allied to the Loris (Stenops) and Makis (Lemur), without marsupial bones, but with placenta.” (“Pedig. of Man.” p. 77.)
Now it may be perhaps interesting to the profane and the innocent to learn that no such “prosimiæ,” with placenta, exists in nature. That it is, in short, another creation of the famous German Evolutionist, and a child of his own brain. For De Quatrefages has pointed out several years ago, that:
“The anatomical investigations of MM. Alphonse Milne, Edwards and Grandidier ... place it beyond all doubt that the prosimiæ of Haeckel 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 Haeckel himself, they cannot even be regarded as the ancestors of the zonoplacential mammals ... and ought to be connected with the pachydermata, the edentata and the cetacea.” (p. 110.)
But, as that great French savant shows, “Haeckel, without the least hesitation, adds his prosimiæ,” to the other groups in the “Pedigree of Man,” and “attributes to them ... a discoidal placenta.” Must the world of the too credulous innocents again accept on faith these two creatures unknown to Science or man, only because “the proof of their existence arises from the necessity of an intermediate type?” This necessity, however being one only for the greater success of their inventor, Haeckel, that Simian Homer must not bear us ill will, if we do not hesitate to call his “genealogy” of man a romance of Science of the wildest type.
One thing is very suggestive in this speculation. The discovery of the absence of the needed placenta in the so-called prosimiæ now dates several years back. Haeckel knows of it, of course. So does Mr. Ed. B. Aveling, D.Sc., his translator. Why is the error allowed to remain uncorrected, and even unnoticed, in the English translation of the “Pedigree of Man,” of 1887? Do the “members of the International Library of Science and Free-thought,” fear to lose some of Haeckel’s admirers were these to learn the truth?
Nevertheless Haeckel’s scientific “Pedigree of Man,” ought to awake and stir up to action the spirit of private enterprise. What a charming Féerie could be made of it on the stage of a theatre! A corps de ballet, composed of antediluvian reptiles and giant lizards, gradually, and stage by stage, metamorphosing themselves into kangaroos, lemurs, tailless apes and anthropoid baboons, and finally into a chorus of German biologists!