Finally, the third and most valuable source of evidence, comparative anatomy, is also, unfortunately, very imperfect; for the simple reason that the whole of the living species of animals are a mere fraction of the vast population that has dwelt on our planet since the beginning of life. We may confidently put the total number of these at more than a million species. The number of animals whose organisation has been studied up to the present in comparative anatomy is proportionately very small. Here, again, future research will yield incalculable treasures. But, for the present, in view of this patent incompleteness of our chief sources of evidence, we must naturally be careful not to lay too much stress in human phylogeny on the particular animals we have studied, or regard all the various stages of development with equal confidence as stem-forms. In my first efforts to construct the series of man’s ancestors I drew up a list of, at first ten, afterwards twenty to thirty, forms that may be regarded more or less certainly as animal ancestors of the human race, or as stages that in a sense mark off the chief sections in the long story of evolution from the unicellular organism to man. Of these twenty to thirty stages, ten to twelve belong to the older group of the Invertebrates and eighteen to twenty to the younger division of the Vertebrates. In approaching, now, the difficult task of establishing the evolutionary succession of these thirty ancestors of humanity since the beginning of life, and in venturing to lift the veil that covers the earliest secrets of the earth’s history, we must undoubtedly look for the first living things among the wonderful organisms that we call the Monera; they are the simplest organisms known to us—in fact, the simplest we can conceive. Their whole body consists merely of a simple particle or globule of structureless plasm or plasson. The discoveries of the last four decades have led us to believe with increasing certainty that wherever a natural body exhibits the vital processes of nutrition, reproduction, voluntary movement, and sensation, we have the action of a nitrogenous carbon-compound of the chemical group of the albuminoids; this plasm (or protoplasm) is the material basis of all vital functions. Whether we regarded the function, in the monistic sense, as the direct action of the material substratum, or whether we take matter and force to be distinct things in the dualistic sense, it is certain that we have not as yet found any living organism in which the exercise of the vital functions is not inseparably bound up with plasm.