The Washington times., 1920-09-26
By Dr.. w. II. ,Ballou.

VIE IneOry tnal man, IN MS dSes-IOng
evolution from amoeba to what he
is to-day, passed through fish-like
stage, and that our arms and hands were
derived from the pectoral fms of the fish,
has long been held by evolutionists. While
it does not shock us particularly to think
that the wondrous curves Of beauty's arms
and the sinewy arms of the ape are kin.
1t has been somewhat annoying to many
to feel that these same curves came from
the fms Of primitive fishes,
Science. caring nothing for the aesthetic
part Of the argument. has now definitely
upset this hypothesis upon purely eviden-
tial grounds. We can now be assured that
we meyer were true fishes, no matter how
coldbiooded the world of man may some
times seem. n,r forefathers always had
some kind or and four of them, a.
that. They NAV hE e been small, like the
there is very good reason for thinking that
some such form as this was the original
parent of man-but they had potentialtiec
for from them gradually evolved the an
phibious animals from which reptiles
birds, mammals and man arose.
In fact, it is rumored that Professc,
Charles d. Walcott, secretary Of the Smith
sonian Institution, Washington, has dis
covered fossils of just such small four
ambed creature in the pre-Cambrian rock
near the Hotel Banff in the Canadian
Rockies. This means that 75,000,0 600 years
ago the ancestors of the people, who built
this place disported themselves in the
ancient seas in which these rocks we're
formed both by sediment and by upheaval
There is, OF course, no possible line of
descent that one can trace between the
present occupants of the site and it's orig
inal inhabitants.
The, final, evoution-smashing dictum
which the scientists at the American
Museum of Natural History, New York,
have Just issued, reads as follows:
"The fins Of fishes are believed not to
have been derived from or to have passed
through any stage comparable to those
passed through by the limbs Of other verte-
brates, but to have been developed from
folds in the membrane"
tOr twenty years, at the American Mu-
scum, those who study existing and ex-
tinct animal life have been carefully col
lecting and preserving the fore limbs of
every creature that has them. The first
astonishing fact observed was that the
bones Of fore limbs of existing creatures
we're almost identical with the bones of
the first of the fore limbs OF the first rep
tiles on earth Of millions OF years ago.
Finally, when all OF the types that have
existed were compared 1t was seen that
there were no relations between them and
the cartilage of the fms OF first OF later
fishes. ~
Up to this time, as has been said evolu-
tionists have placed certain ancient FISH in
the line of ancestry Of man, preceding am
-phib!ans, called Crossopterigii. or peculiar
sharks and ganoids that lived in the
Paleozoic Age The reason for setting up
the two forward-paired fms of the Cross
opterigii as ancestral, OF, rather, side-line
ancestral, TO the human arm and hand, was
that the basal supports Of their fms had
become fused. These fused basal supports,
however we're cartilage-rtt bone
We know that positively, because two
species of these fish became what we call
'iivlng fossils"--that Is. still exist for ex.
animation. One Of them is the Polyterus
OF the Nile River and the other Is Gala
moichthys OF West African rivers. Even
the two forward paddles of a preJCambrian
crab, by which IL brushed food into its
mouth, could have evolved into q far bet
ter type OF fore limbs for later creatures
These same primitive crabs, by the way,
were ancestors to many existing creatures
They were not true crabs, but we're crab.
liko. .,.