THE ASCENT OF MAN 



1 . 



NO one thinks less of Sir Isaac Newton because he was 

 born as a very puny infant, and no one should think less 

 of the human race because it sprang from a stock of 

 aboreal mammals. There is no doubt as to man's apartness from 

 the rest of creation when he is seen at his best "a little lower 

 than the angels, crowned with glory and honour." "What a piece 

 of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in 

 faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in 

 action how like an angel! in apprehension so like a God." Never- 

 theless, all the facts point to his affiliation to the stock to which 

 monkeys and apes also belong. Not, indeed, that man is de- 

 scended from any living ape or monkey; it is rather that he and 

 they have sprung from a common ancestry are branches of the 

 same stem. This conclusion is so momentous that the reasons 

 for accepting it must be carefully considered. They were ex- 

 pounded with masterly skill in Darwin's Descent of Man in 1871 

 a book which was but an expansion of a chapter in The Origin 

 of Species (1859). 



Anatomical Proof of Man's Relationship with a Simian Stock 



The anatomical structure of man is closely similar to that 

 of the anthropoid apes the gorilla, the orang, the chimpanzee, 

 and the gibbon. Bone for bone, muscle for muscle, blood-vessel 

 for blood-vessel, nerve for nerve, man and ape agree. As the 



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