Professor E. S. Morse, in his address to the American Association, in 1876, as vice-president, takes as a theme the contributions of American zoologists to theories of evolution, and closes with those which refer to what he modestly terms "man's lowly origin." These contributions he sums up under three heads, as bearing on the following points: "1. That in his earlier stages he reveals certain persistent characters of the ape; 2. That the more ancient men reveal more ape-like features than the present existing men; and, 3. That certain characteristics pertaining to early men still persist in the inferior races of men." Under the first head he gives contributions to the well-known fact that embryonic stages of the human being, like those of other high types, approximate to forms permanent in lower types. This is a fact inseparable from the law of reproduction; and as has been already shown in the text, absolutely without logical significance as even an analogical argument in favor of evolution. Under the second and third heads, he refers to cases of exceptional skulls and bones belonging to idiots and degraded races of men, as showing tendencies to lower forms, which as a matter of course they do, though with essential differences still marking them as human; and he assumes without any proof that these were relatively more common in primitive times, and that they are cases of reversion to a previous simian stage, instead of being results of abnormal conditions in the individual or variety. He sums up these arguments in the following paragraph: "If we take into account the rapidly accumulating data of European naturalists concerning primitive man, with the mass of evidence presented in these notes, we find an array of facts which irresistibly point to a common origin with animals directly below us, and these evidences are found in the massive skulls with coarse ridges for muscular attachments, the rounding of the base of the nostrils, the early ossification of the nasal bones, the small cranial capacity in certain forms, the prominence of the frontal crest, the posterior position of the _foramen magnum_, the approximation of the temporal ridges, the lateral flattening of the tibia, the perforation of the humerus, the tendency of the pelvis to depart from its usual proportions; and, associated with all these, a rudeness of culture and the evidence of the manifestation of the coarsest instincts. He must be blind, indeed, who can not recognize the bearing of such grave and suggestive modifications."