14 THE RISK OF MAN. 



creature, and we can very well imagine that he was daring 

 and bold and savage. It must have been dangerous for 

 any weaker mammal to cross his path or to fall a prey to 

 his ruthless hands, for he was still thoughtless and in- 

 considerate. He had to make his living from roots and 

 berries and nuts, perhaps also by eating the flesh of some 

 birds and animals that he might catch, and life must have 

 been hard on him. Yet we must not forget that the ten- 

 derer feelings of friendship, conjugal affection, and paren- 

 tal love must have been at least as strongly developed in 

 him as they are in many brute animals, for the probability 

 is that the most essential features that the ape-man ac- 

 quired in his ascent came not only from his keener intel- 

 ligence, but also, perhaps even mainly, from an increased 

 refinement of his sentiment. 



The doctrine of evolution would have been accepted 

 without much opposition, had it not been for its implication 

 of the descent of man from some brute ancestry. All 

 possible arguments have been exhausted to weaken the 

 theory proposed by Darwin and his successors. How 

 much has been said and written about the "missing link," 

 as if the acceptability of the doctrine of evolution depended 

 solely upon the verification of the transition from the 

 brute animal to the intelligent homo sapiens. The truth 

 is that there are innumerable missing links in the scale 

 of life, and it will forever be impossible to point out every 

 single phase through which man has passed since he 

 started from the beginning. 



In the meantime many discoveries of primitive human 

 remains have been made which indicate that there was 

 indeed no gap between the highest ape types and the lower 

 races of man, which corroborates the assumption that 

 man is descended, not from the ape, but after all from 

 some animal kin to the ape. 



