"The lower American apes meet us with what seems 'the front of Jove himself,' compared with the gigantic, but low-browed denizens of tropical Western Africa. "In fact, in the words of the illustrious Dutch naturalists, Messrs. Schroeder, Van der Kolk, and Vrolik, the lines of affinity existing between different Primates construct rather a network than a ladder. "It is indeed a tangled web, the meshes of which no naturalist has as yet unravelled by the aid of natural selection. Nay, more, these complex affinities form such a net for the use of the teleological retiarius as it would be difficult for his Lucretian antagonist to evade, even with the countless turns and doublings of Darwinian evolutions." 1 2 And yet we are told by Professor Tyndall that the naturalist whose mind is "most deeply stored with the choicest materials of the teleologist," rejects teleology. Does he then effect his escape from the reticulations of the complex affinities now specified? By no means. he refers the spontaneous and independent appearance of these similar structures to "atavism," and "reversion;" to the appearance 1 Professor Mivart, ut sup., pp. 174, 175. But that is, in modern descendants, of ancient and sometimes long-lost structural characters, which are supposed to have formerly existed in ancestors more or less remote, and wholly hypothetical. But if this were true: "if man and the orang are diverging descendants of a creature with certain cerebral characters, then that remote ancestor must also have had the wrist of the chimpanzee, the voice of a long-armed ape, the blade-bone of the gorilla, the chin of the siamang, the skull-dome of an American ape, the ischium of a slender loris, the whiskers and beard of a saki, the liver and stomach of the gibbons, and the number of other characters in which the various several forms of higher or lower Primates respectively approximate to man. "But to assert this is as much as to say that low down in the scale of Primates was an ancestral form so like man that it might well be called an homunculus; and we have the virtual pre-existence of man's body supposed, in order to account for the actual first appearance of that body as we know it :-a supposition manifestly absurd if put forward as an explanation." 1 19. Nor is it an insignificant circumstance, 1 "Lessons from Nature," p. 176. as indicating the wholly hypothetical character of the ape ancestry thus assigned to man, that neither on the earth nor under the earth is any trace of such an ancestry discoverable. The number is not small of those who prefer to search the record of the rocks for "Vestiges" of Creation rather than for Footprints of the Creator; but no vestige of man's ascent from the ape is yet producible. In default therefore of evidence adducible from that which is, we are liberally supplied with asseverations as to that which might, or "must have been." There must, for example, have been "a series of forms graduating insensibly from some apelike creature to man as he now exists." 1 Now of the series thus alleged, every single member was ex hypothesi superior to the lower forms from which he sprang. And Mr. Darwin's doctrine affirms "the survival of the fittest." But while the half-apes are with us to this day the half-men are nowhere. The ape-mothers that found themselves, in the last term of the series, strangely producing men, have perished; while the monkeys, unequal to the production even of apes, have survived. According to the hypothesis the fittest should survive; according to the facts the fittest have perished. 1 "Descent of Man," vol. i. p. 235. > But this is not all. Besides this imaginary "series of forms," the theory requires further a process of "graduating insensibly." And of this process there is not only no proof, but the evidence, such as it is, points in the direction of disproof. It is Mr. Darwin himself who says, "Breaks incessantly occur in all parts of the series, some being wide, sharp, and defined, others less so in various degrees; as between the orang and its nearest allies-between the Tarsius and the other Lemurida." The "intellectual figment" is in evil case when it postulates a process of graduation so gradual as to be imperceptible, yet so abrupt as to exhibit "breaks" which "incessantly occur in all parts of the series," not excluding even "breaks" which are "wide, sharp, and defined." And yet, across these "breaks," Mr. Darwin's theory, by Mr. Darwin's ingenuity, is made to swing its ponderous bulk with an adroit dexterity that might have been envied, in the depths of his African forest, by the ancestral Gorilla himself: "All these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms that have become extinct." 1 Could anything be more simple ? The "breaks" are there indeed: but they are 1 "Descent of Man," vol. i. pp. 200, 201. there only in the absence of the "related forms "graduating insensibly." You have only to imagine the "forms" and the "breaks" will disappear. And yet, of these same "forms" it is all the while most certain that they cannot be described; they are not known to have existed; they are not known to have been "related"; they are not known to "have become extinct." Nor are the "breaks more real. They are breaks only on the assumption of the hypothesis not otherwise. And the second assumption has no power to confer validity on the first. 20. From this tissue of assumptions we revert to the facts. No less a writer than Mr. Wallace, "the independent originator and by far the best expounder of the theory of Natural Selection," differs toto cælo from Mr. Darwin on the question of the Origin of Man. For the creation of man, as he is, Mr. Wallace postulates the necessity of the intervention of an external Will. He observes that even the lowest types of savages are in possession of capacities far beyond any use to which they can apply them in their present condition, and therefore they could not have been evolved from the mere necessities |