The fourth and last phase of the world's history must be for us men that latest period of time which has witnessed the development of our own race. Lamarck (1809) had already recognized that this evolution is only rationally conceivable as the outcome of a natural process, by "descent from the apes," our next of kin among the mammals. Huxley then proved, in his famous essay on _The Place of Man in Nature_, that this momentous thesis is an inevitable consequence of the theory of descent, and is thoroughly established by the facts of anatomy, embryology, and palæontology. He considered this "question of all questions" to be substantially answered. Darwin followed with a brilliant discussion of the question under many aspects in his _Descent of Man_ (1871). I had myself devoted a special chapter to this important problem of the science of evolution in my _General Morphology_ (1866). In 1874 I published my _Anthropogeny_, which contains the first attempt to trace the descent of man through the entire chain of his ancestry right up to the earliest archigonous monera; the attempt was based equally on the three great "documents" of evolutionary science--anatomy, embryology, and palæontology. The progress we have made in anthropogenetic research during the last few years is described in the paper which I read on "Our Present Knowledge of the Origin of Man" at the International Congress of Zoologists at Cambridge in 1898.[28]
IV.--MONISTIC ANTHROPOGENY
From The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the Nineteenth Century by Ernst Haeckel.
