THE ORIGIN OF MAN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19769, 17 October 1927, Page 9

THE ORIGIN OF MAN.

DARWIN AMD HIS THEORY. BRITISH SCIENTIST'S SUPPORT. "OUR COUSIN THE GORILLA." "Was Darwin right when he said that man, under the action of biological forces, has been raised, from a place among anthropoid apes to that which he now occupies? The answer is yes!" In these words Sir Arthur Keith, in a memorable presidential address to the British Association recently, delivered tEe verdict of modern science on Darwin's theory of man's descent. Sir Arthur's words were followed with keen interest by members of the association assembled at Leeds, and by the larger unseen audience who received the speech by wireless.

Besides reviewing the evidence which, he said, since the time of Darwin, baa been accumulated in support of the famous theory. Sir Arthur Keith indulged in fascicati'ig speculations regarding man's origin and ancestry. For solution in the future he propounded his own problem: "Will the day ever come when we can explain why the brain of man has made such progress while that ol his cousin the gorilla has fallen so far behind ?"

In justification of his faith is the impregnability of the Darwinian Theory, Sir Arthur said that the evidence of man's evolution from an ape-like being, obtained from a study Of fossil remains, "is dgfiuite and irrefutable." In unravelling man's pedigree by "threading oar way not along the links of a chain, bat through meshes of it complicated network," mistakes had been made, and it was now clear that evolution had not proceeded m the orderly manner previously supposed. Nevertheless, he said, "All the evidence ' now at our disposal supports the conclusion that man has arisen as Lamarck and Darwin suspected, from an anthropoid ape not higher in the zoological scale than a chimpanzee, and that the date at which human and anthropoid lines of descent began to diverge lies near the beginning of the Miocene period." On a modest scale of reckoning, Sir Arthur explained, that gave man the "respectable antiquity" erf about 1,085,G00 years. It was the consideration that, "no matter what line of evidence we follow, we reach the conviction that man's brain has been evolved from that of an anthropoid apo," which led Sir Arthur to speak of the great difference, quantitatively, between man's brain and that of his cousin, the gorilla. We had to recognise that the tendency to increase of brain, which culminated in the production of the human organ, was not confined to man'a ancestry, but appeared in diverse brandies cf the mammalian stock at a corresponding period of the earth's history. Finally, the president indicated the

sources of knowledge which may ultimately enable man not only to write his own history, but to explain why the events took the course they had done.