CHAP. VI.] MAN. 175 



panzee, why do not the proportions of the legs serve to 

 promote the rank of the gibbons ? 



If the * bridging convolutions &quot; of the orang go to sustain 

 its claim to supremacy, they also go far to sustain a similar 

 claim on the part of the long-tailed, thumbless spider- 

 monkeys. 



If the obliquely-ridged teeth of Simia and Troglodytes point 

 to community of origin, how can we deny a similar commu 

 nity of origin, as thus estimated, to the howling monkeys and 

 galagos ? 



The liver of the gibbons proclaims them almost human ; 

 that of the gorilla declares him comparatively brutal. 



The ear-lobule of the gorilla makes him our cousin ; but 

 his tongue is eloquent in his own dispraise. 



The slender loris, from amidst the half-apes, can put in 

 many a claim to be our shadow refracted, as it were, through 

 a lemurine prism. 



The lower American apes meet us with what seems &quot; the 

 front of Jove himself,&quot; 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 natu 

 ralist 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 will be difficult for his 

 Lucretian antagonist to evade, even with the countless turns 

 and doublings of Darwinian evolutions. 



But it may be replied, the spontaneous and independent 

 appearance of these similar structures is due to &quot; atavism &quot; 

 and &quot; reversion &quot; to the reappearance, that is, in modern 

 descendants, of ancient and sometimes long-lost structural 

 characters, which formerly existed in more or less remote 

 hypothetical ancestors. 



Let us see to what this reply brings us. If it is true, and 



