Dr. Clark Wissler, for example, who is the Curator-in-Chief of the Anthropological section of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, made, in the course of an interview published in the _New York American_ of April 2, 1918, the following statement: “Man, like the horse or elephant, just happened anyhow, so far as has been discovered yet. As far as science has discovered, there always was a man—some not so developed, but still human beings in all their functions, much as we are today.” Asked by the reporter, whether this did not favor the idea of an abrupt, unheralded appearance of man on earth, Doctor Wissler replied: “Man came out of a blue sky as far as we have been able to delve back.” Fearing lest the reporter might have sensationalized his words, the writer took occasion to question the learned anthropologist on the subject during the Pan Pacific Conference held at Honolulu, Hawaii (Aug. 2-20, 1920). His answer was that the foregoing citations were substantially correct. The same verdict is given by the great palæontologist, Prof. W. Branco, Director of the Institute of Geology and Palæontology at the University of Berlin. In his discourse on “Fossil Man” delivered August 16, 1901, before the Fifth International Zoölogical Congress at Berlin, Branco said, with reference to the origin of man: “Palæontology tells us nothing on the subject—it knows no ancestors of man.” The well-known palæontologist Karl A. von Zittel reached the same conclusion. He says somewhere (probably in his “Grundzüge der Paläontologie”): “Such material as this (the discovered remains of fossil men) throws no light upon the question of race and descent. All the human bones of determinable age that have come down to us from the European Diluvium, as well as all the skulls discovered in caves, are identified by their size, shape, and capacity as belonging to _Homo sapiens_, and are fine specimens of their kind. They do not by any means fill up the gap between man and the ape.” Joseph Le Conte repeats the identical refrain. In the revised Fairchild edition (1903) of his “Elements of Geology” we read: “The earliest men yet found are in no sense connecting links between man and ape. They are distinctly human.” (Ch. VI, p. 638.) Replying to Haeckel, who in his “Welträtsel” proclaims man’s descent from pithecoid primates to be _an historical fact_, J. Reinke, the biologist of Kiel, declares: “We are merely having dust thrown in our eyes when we read in a widely circulated book by Ernst Haeckel the following words: ‘That man is immediately descended from apes, and more remotely from a long line of lower vertebrates, remains established as an indubitable historic fact, fraught with important consequences.’ It is absurd to speak of anything as a fact when experience lends it no support.” (“Haeckel’s Monism and Its Supporters,” Leipzig, 1907, p. 6.) The sum-total, in fact, of scientific knowledge concerning the origin of the human body is