Even now there are thinkers who, like Wallace, shrink from applying to man the ultimate consequences of the theory of descent. The idea that man is derived from ape-like forms is to them unpleasant and humiliating.
So far I have been depicting the development of Darwin's work on the descent of man. In what follows I shall endeavour to give a condensed survey of the contents of the book.
It must at once be said that the contents of Darwin's work fall into two parts, dealing with entirely different subjects. _The Descent of Man_ includes a very detailed investigation in regard to secondary sexual characters in the animal series, and on this investigation Darwin founded a new theory, that of sexual selection. With astonishing patience he gathered together an immense mass of material, and showed, in regard to Arthropods and Vertebrates, the wide distribution of secondary characters, which develop almost exclusively in the male, and which enable him, on the one hand, to get the better of his rivals in the struggle for the female by the greater perfection of his weapons, and, on the other hand, to offer greater allurements to the female through the higher development of decorative characters, of song, or of scent-producing glands. The best equipped males will thus crowd out the less well-equipped in the matter of reproduction, and thus the relevant characters will be increased and perfected through sexual selection. It is, of course, a necessary assumption that these secondary sexual characters may be transmitted to the female, although perhaps in rudimentary form.
As we have said, this story of sexual selection takes up a great deal of space in Darwin's book, and it need only be considered here in so far as Darwin applied it to the descent of man. To this latter problem the whole of Part I is devoted, while Part III contains a discussion of sexual selection in relation to man, and a general summary. Part II treats of sexual selection in general, and may be disregarded in our present study. Moreover, many interesting details must necessarily be passed over in what follows, for want of space.
The first part of the _Descent of Man_ begins with an enumeration of the proofs of the animal descent of man taken from the structure of the human body. Darwin chiefly emphasises the fact that the human body consists of the same organs and of the same tissues as those of the other mammals; he shows also that man is subject to the same diseases and tormented by the same parasites as the apes. He further dwells on the general agreement exhibited by young embryonic forms, and he illustrates this by two figures placed one above the other, one representing a human embryo, after Ecker, the other a dog embryo, after Bischoff.[89]