Man and His Ancestor: A Study in Evolution is Charles Morris’s late-nineteenth-century survey of the evidence for human descent, written to make Darwinian and post-Darwinian theory accessible to a general reading public. Morris draws on comparative anatomy, embryology, and the fossil record then available to trace humankind’s place within the animal kingdom and to argue for continuity between humans and other primates.
The book reflects the confident evolutionary outlook of its era, weaving together biology, geology, and early anthropology. While many of its specific claims have been superseded, it remains a revealing document of how educated Victorians absorbed the idea of human evolution. Read it as a window onto the popular science of the period and the questions that animated early students of human origins.