THE FATHER OF THE FIRST MAN.

Wellington Independent, Volume XXVI, Issue 3244, 6 July 1871, Page 3

THE FATHER OF THE FIRST MAN.

(From the ' Saturday Beview.") Mr Darwin considers he has at length found the missing link whereby man, the wonder and glory of the universe, is connected through the successive grades of Simiadea, Lemuridee, placental and marsupial mammals, reptiles, and. amphibians, with his earliest vertibrate ancestry, a group of marine animals resembling the larvoe of existing Ascidians. He says — By considering the embryologica! structure of a man — (he homologies which he presents with the lower animal — the rudiments which he retains — and the reversions to which tie is reliable — we can partly recall in imagination the former condition of our early progenitors, and can approximately place them in their proper position in the zoological series. We thus learn that man descended from a hairy quadruped, furnished with a .tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World. This creature, if its whole structure had been examined by a naturalist, would have been classed amongst the Quadrumana, as surely as would the common and still more ancient progenitor of the Old and New World monkeys. The Quadrumana and all the higher mammals are probably derived from an ancient marsupial animal, and this through a long line of diversified forms cither from some reptile-like or some Amphibian-like creature, and this again from some fish like animal. In the dim obscurity of the past we can see that the early progenitor of all the Vertebruta must have been an aquatic animal, provided with branchiae, with the two sexes united in the same individual, and with the most important organs of the body (such as the brain and heart) imperfectly developed. This animal seems to have been more like the larva? of our existing marine Ascidians than any other known form.