PEIMITIVE MAN. 361 



creature near of kin, nor do we find any such creature 

 in those rich Tertiary beds which have yielded so 

 great harvests of mammalian bones. In the modern 

 world we find nothing nearer to him than such anthro- 

 poid apes as the orangs and gorillas. But the apes, 

 however nearly allied, cannot be the ancestors of man. 

 If at all related to him by descent, they are his 

 brethren or cousins, not his parents ; for they must, on 

 the evolutionist hypothesis, be themselves the terminal 

 ends of distinct lines of derivation from previous 

 forms. 



This difficulty is not removed by an appeal to the 

 imperfection of the geological record. So many 

 animals contemporary with man are known, both at 

 the beginning of his geological history and in the 

 present world, that it would be more than marvellous 

 if no very near relative had ere this time been dis- 

 covered at one extreme or the other, or at some 

 portion of the intervening ages. Further, all the 

 animals contemporary with man in the Post-glacial 

 period, so far as is known, are in the same case. 

 Discoveries of this kind may, however, still be made, 

 and we may give the evolutionist the benefit of the 

 possibility. We may affirm, however, that in order 

 to gain a substratum of fact for his doctrine, he must 

 find somewhere in the later Tertiary period animals 

 much nearer to man than are the present anthropoid 

 apes. 



This demand I make advisedly first, because the 

 animals in question must precede man in geological 



