Man and His Ancestor: A Study in Evolution

At a time when evolution was still revolutionary and hotly debated, Charles Morris wrote this clear-eyed defence of human origins from lower animals. Published in the late 19th century, when the echoes of Darwin's revelations were still shaking the foundations of Victorian thought, Man and His Ancestor stands as a period document that captures exactly how educated people in that era confronted the question of where we came from. Morris pulls no punches: he sets up the binary immediately, pitting divine authority against empirical evidence, and makes his allegiance to science unmistakable. What follows is a rigorous survey of the evidence available at the time: comparative anatomy, the fossil record, and the emerging field of developmental biology. He discusses vestigial structures and what they reveal about our evolutionary past. For modern readers, the value is less in the specific scientific claims and more in the window it provides into the intellectual climate of the 1890s, when the theory of evolution was still fighting for acceptance. This is a document of its moment, revealing both the certainty of early evolutionary advocates and the questions they were trying to answer.