In a richly illustrated and widely read work that Hans Kraemer published a few years ago, under the title, _The Universe and Man_, an able and learned anthropologist, Professor Klaatsch of Heidelberg, deals with "the origin and development of the human race," and admirably describes the primitive history of man and his civilisation. However, he denounces the idea of man's descent from the ape as "irrational, narrow-minded, and false"; he grounds this severe censure on the fact that none of the living apes can be the ancestor of humanity. But no competent scientist had ever said anything so foolish. If we look closer into this fight with windmills, we find that Klaatsch holds substantially the same view of the pithecoid theory as I have done since 1866. He says expressly: "The three anthropoid apes, the gorilla, chimpanzee, and orang, seem to diverge from a common root, which was near to that of the gibbon and man." I had long ago given the name of _archiprimas_ to this single hypothetical root-form of the primates, which he calls the "primatoid." It lived in the earliest part of the Tertiary period, and had probably been developed in the Cretaceous from older mammals. The very forced and unnatural hypothesis by means of which Klaatsch goes on to make the primates depart very widely from the other mammals, seems to me to be quite untenable, like the similar hypothesis that Alsberg, Wilser, and other anthropologists who deny our pithecoid descent, have lately advanced. All these attempts have a common object--to save man's privileged position in Nature, to widen as much as possible the gulf between him and the rest of the mammals, and to conceal his real origin. It is the familiar tendency of the _parvenu_, which we so often notice in the aristocratic sons of energetic men who have won a high position by their own exertions. This sort of vanity is acceptable enough to the ruling powers and the Churches, because it tends to support their own fossilised pretensions to a "Divine image" in man and a special "Divine grace" in princes. The zoologist or anthropologist who studies our genealogy in a strictly scientific spirit takes no more notice of these tendencies than of the _Almanach de Gotha_. He seeks to discover the naked truth, as it is yielded by the great results of modern science, in which there is no longer any doubt that man is really a descendant of the ape--that is to say, of a long extinct anthropoid ape. As has been pointed out over and over again by distinguished supporters of this opinion, the proofs of it are exceptionally clear and simple--much clearer and simpler than they are in regard to many other mammals. Thus, for instance, the origin of the elephants, the armadilloes, the sirena, or the whales, is a much more difficult problem than the origin of man.