Professor Tyler aims to trace the development of
man from the simple living substance to his position at present,
paying attention to incidental facts merely as incidental and
contributory. He keeps always in view the successive accomplishments
of life as they appear in the person of accepted general truth,
rather than in the guise of the facts of progress.
He begins by saying: "We take for granted the probable truth of the
theory of evolution as stated by Mr. Darwin, and that it applies to
man as really as to any lower animal." He assumes that an acceptable
historian of biology must possess a genealogical tree of the animal
kingdom, and adds that a knowledge of the sequence of dominant
functions or "physiological dynasties," is quite as necessary to his
inquiry as a history of the development of anatomical details. Since
the germs of the future are always concealed in the history of the
present, he claims that "if we can trace this sequence of dominant
functions, whose evolution has filled past ages, we can safely
foretell something, at least, of man's future development."
The possibility of making false trails, at times, should not deter
the investigator; for what he would establish is not the history of
a single human race, nor of the movements of a century, but an
understanding of the development of animal life through ages.
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