Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 April 1892 — Is Darwinism a Failure? [ARTICLE]

Is Darwinism a Failure?

Since the Darwinian theory of the origin of man made its first victorious mark, twenty years ago, we have sought for the intermediate stages which were supposed to connect man with the apes; the proto man, tlie pro anthropos, is discovered. For anthropological science the pro anthropos is even a subject of discussion. At that time in Innspruck the prospect was, apparently, that the course of descent from ape to man would be reconstructed all at once; but now we cannot even prove the descent of the separate races from one another. At this moment we are able to say that among the peoples of antiquity no single one was any nearer to the apes than we are.

At this moment I can affirm that there is not upon earth any absolutely unknown race of men. The least known of all are the people of the central mountainous district.of the Malay Peninsula, but otherwise we know that the people of Terra del Fuego quite as well as the Esquimaux, Bashkirs, Polynesians, and Lapps. Nay, we know mere of many of these races than we do of certain European tribes; I need only mention the Albanians. Every living race is still human; no single one has yet been found that we can designate as simian or quasi-simian. Even when in certain ones phenomena appear which are characteristic of the apes—e. g., the peculiar ape-like projections of the skull in certain races—still we cannot say that these men are ape-like.—Prof. Virchow, before the late Anthropological Congress in Vienna.