DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESES. 205 



him. Against this, however, all reason and moral instinct 

 recoils. To transmute the monkey into man, even though 

 the change were effected, step "by step, through a whole 

 wilderness of monkeys, could not invest the brutish nature 

 with the human intellect, or endow the progeny of the 

 irresponsible beast with the moral responsibility of man ! 

 Admitting the similarity of physical organisation admit- 

 ting the lowdy condition of the lowest varieties of the 

 human race and granting that the difference between the 

 most highly endowed philosopher and most degraded 

 savage was even greater than that between the lowest 

 savage and the most exalted monkey still we know of no 

 intermediate forms, living or extinct,* to bridge over the 

 gulf that lies between no germ of moral perception in the 

 brute, whereon to graft the improving consciousness of 

 moral responsibility in the man. Here then (admitting 

 that men had been physically descended from monkeys) 

 there is something in the man unknown and unevidenced 

 in the brute ; and unless we can learn to regard this 

 superadded gift of reason and moral perception to say 

 nothing of religious sentiment in the light of a new 

 creation, the common ground of argument is removed from 

 between us, and conviction becomes impossible. Even 

 were w r e to concede the point of mental relationship, and 

 to admit that science could trace the most intimate rela- 

 tions of organic life that life which associates man with 

 the plants and animals around him ; still (as has been 



* It has been hinted, no doubt, that as other mammalia have had 

 their gigantic tertiary precursors, so it is likely the gorilla and chim- 

 panzee were also preceded by larger and more man-like forms of monkey. 

 Of the existence of such forms we have not, at present, the slightest 

 indication ; but, admitting the ingenuity of the surmise, and supposing 

 such remains were to be discovered to-morrow, it will still remain to be 

 shown that larger and more erect aspects of ape must necessarily be 

 endowed with higher mental and more man-like qualities. 



