Anatomy, Comparative; Embryology, Human; Evolution; Human beings -- Origin
We find just the same thing in comparing the various dead and living
languages that have developed from a common primitive tongue. If we
examine our genealogical tree of the Indo-Germanic languages in this
light, we see at once that all the older or parent tongues, of which
we regard the living varieties of the stem as divergent daughter or
grand-daughter languages, have been extinct for some time. The
Aryo-Romanic and the Slavo-Germanic tongues have completely
disappeared; so also the Aryan, the Greco-Roman, the Slavo-Lettic, and
the ancient Germanic. Even their daughters and grand-daughters have
been lost; all the living Indo-Germanic languages are only related in
the sense that they are divergent descendants of common stem-forms.
Some forms have diverged more, and some less, from the original
stem-form.
This easily demonstrable fact illustrates very well the analogous case
of the origin of the vertebrate species. Phylogenetic comparative
philology here yields a strong support to phylogenetic comparative
zoology. But the one can adduce more direct evidence than the other,
as the paleontological material of philology--the old monuments of the
extinct tongue--have been preserved much better than the
paleontological material of zoology, the fossilised bones and imprints
of vertebrates.
We may, however, trace man's genealogical tree not only as far as the
lower mammals, but much further--to the amphibia, to the shark-like
primitive fishes, and, in fine, to the skull-less vertebrates that
closely resembled the Amphioxus. But this must not be understood in
the sense that the existing Amphioxus, or the sharks or amphibia of
to-day, can give us any idea of the external appearance of these
remote stem-forms. Still less must it be thought that the Amphioxus or
any actual shark, or any living species of amphibia, is a real
ancestral form of the higher vertebrates and man. The statement can
only rationally mean that the living forms I have referred to are
COLLATERAL LINES that are much more closely related to the extinct
stem-forms, and have retained the resemblance much better, than any
other animals we know. They are still so like them in regard to their
distinctive internal structure that we should put them in the same
class with the extinct forms if we had these before us. But no direct
descendants of these earlier forms have remained unchanged. Hence we
must entirely abandon the idea of finding direct ancestors of the
human race in their characteristic EXTERNAL FORM among the living
species of animals. The essential and distinctive features that still
connect living forms more or less closely with the extinct common
stem-forms lie in the internal structure, not the external appearance.
The latter has been much modified by adaptation. The former has been
more or less preserved by heredity.
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