The first scientific application of the Darwinian theory to man was
made by Huxley, the greatest zoologist in England. This able and
learned scientist, to whom zoology owes much of its progress,
published in 1863 a small work entitled Evidence as to Man's Place in
Nature. In the extremely important and interesting lectures which made
up this work he proved clearly that the descent of man from the ape
followed necessarily from the theory of descent. If that theory is
true, we are bound to conceive the animals which most closely resemble
man as those from which humanity has been gradually evolved. About the
same time Carl Vogt published a larger work on the same subject. We
must also mention Gustav Jaeger and Friedrich Rolle among the
zoologists who accepted and taught the theory of evolution immediately
after the publication of Darwin's book, and maintained that the
descent of man from the lower animals logically followed from it. The
latter published, in 1866, a work on the origin and position of man.

About the same time I attempted, in the second volume of my General
Morphology (1866), to apply the theory of evolution to the whole
organic kingdom, including man.* (* Huxley spoke of this "as one of
the greatest scientific works ever published."--Translator.) I
endeavoured to sketch the probable ancestral trees of the various
classes of the animal world, the protists, and the plants, as it
seemed necessary to do on Darwinian principles, and as we can actually
do now with a high degree of confidence. If the theory of descent,
which Lamarck first clearly formulated and Darwin thoroughly
established, is true, we should be able to draw up a natural
classification of plants and animals in the light of their genealogy,
and to conceive the large and small divisions of the system as the
branches and twigs of an ancestral tree. The eight genealogical tables