284 THE DOCTRINE OF DESCENT. 



of man and his history,* and this implies that man must 

 be included with other organic beings in any general 

 conclusion respecting the manner of his appearance on 

 this earth." 



Nay, Darwin himself has now gone further, and, to 

 the terror of all who can scarce imagine man except as 

 created shaven and armed with a book on etiquette, he 

 has sketched a certainly not flattering, and perhaps in 

 many points not correct, portrait of our presumptive 

 ancestors in the phase of dawning humanity. 



Before we seriously discuss this serious subject, we will 

 take leave to quote a more superficial verdict given by 

 a clever essayist.*^ " Let us suppose, merely as a joke, 

 that Nature, which we see everywhere advancing from 

 the most simple to the complex, from the lower to the 

 higher, had not suddenly waived this law in the presence 

 of man ; that she had not suddenly given up her evolu- 

 tion for his sake ; that she had not suddenly begun in 

 him a new creation ; but that here, as elsewiiere, she had 

 proceeded quietly, gradually, naturally, and that man 

 w^ere thus nothing more than the last link of the inter- 

 minable series of animals, nothing more than a ' de- 

 veloped ape.' The first thought that would then 

 obtrude itself upon us, would be that the facts were not 

 altered in the slightest degree ; that man would remain 

 as he is, with the same shape, the same face, the same 

 gait, the same gestures, the same dispositions, powers, 

 feelings, thoughts, and with the same dominion over the 

 apes as heretofore. This is very simple, very self-evi- 

 dent, but also very important. For it confers on him — 

 on man — the powerful sensation that, as he now is, he is 

 a being of a quite peculiar kind, very difTerent from 



