The great advance that anthropology has made in the second half of the nineteenth century is due, in the first place, to Darwin 's discovery of the origin of man. No other problem in the whole field of research is so momentous as that of “Man 's place in nature,” which was justly described by Huxley (1863) as the most fundamental of all questions. Yet the scientific solution of this problem was impossible until the theory of descent had been established.

It is now a hundred years since the great French biologist Jean Lamarck published his Philosophic Zoologique. By a remarkable coincidence the year in which that work was issued, 1809, was the year of the birth of his most distinguished successor, Charles Darwin. Lamarck had already recognised that the descent of man from a series of other Vertebrates—that is, from a series of Ape-like Primates—was essentially involved in the general theory of transformation which he had erected on a broad inductive basis ; and he had sufficient penetration to detect the agencies that had been at work in the evolution of the erect bimanous man from the arboreal and quadrumanous ape.