In view of the very great importance of this pithecoid theory, we will first cast a brief glance at its founders and then summarise the proofs in support of it. The famous French biologist, Jean Lamarck, was the first scientist definitely to affirm the descent of man from the ape and seek to give scientific proof of it. In his splendid work, fifty years in advance of his time, the _Philosophie Zoologique_ (1809), he clearly traced the modifications and advances that must have taken place in the transformation of the man-like apes (the primate forms similar to the orang and the chimpanzee); the adaptation to walking upright, the consequent modification of the hands and feet, and later, the formation of speech and the attainment of a higher degree of intelligence. Lamarck's remarkable theory, and this important consequence of it, soon fell into oblivion. When Darwin brought evolution to the front again fifty years afterwards, he paid no attention to the special conclusion. He was content to make the following brief prophetic observation in his work: "Light will be thrown on the origin and the history of man." Even this innocent remark seemed so momentous to the first German translator of the work, Bronn, that he suppressed it. When Darwin was asked by Wallace whether he would not go more fully into it, he replied: "I think of avoiding the whole subject, as it is so much involved in prejudice; though I quite admit that it is the highest and most interesting problem for the thinker." The first thorough works of importance on the subject appeared in 1863. Thomas Huxley in England, and Carl Vogt in Germany, endeavoured to show that the descent of man from the ape was a necessary consequence of Darwinism, and to provide an empirical base for the theory by every available argument. Huxley's work on _Man's Place in Nature_ was particularly valuable. He first gave convincingly, in three lectures, the empirical evidence on the subject--the natural history of the anthropoid apes, the anatomical and embryological relations of man to the next lowest animals, and the recently discovered fossil human remains. I then (1866) made the first attempt to establish the theory of evolution comprehensively by research in anatomy and embryology, and to determine the chief stages in the natural classification of the vertebrates that must have been passed through by our earlier vertebrate ancestors. Anthropology thus becomes a part of zoology. In my _History of Creation_ I further developed these early evolutionary sketches, and improvements were made in the successive editions.