238 Men. 



that is, in modern descendants, of ancient and 

 sometimes long-lost structural characters, which 

 are supposed to have formerly existed in 

 ancestors more or less remote, and wholly 

 hypothetical. 



But if this were true : "if man and the orang 

 are diverging descendants of a creature with 

 certain cerebral characters, then that remote 

 ancestor must also have had the wrist of the 

 chimpanzee, the voice of a long-armed ape, the 

 blade-bone of the gorilla, the chin of the siam- 

 ang, the skull-dome of an American ape, the 

 ischium of a slender loris, the whiskers and 

 beard of a saki, the liver and stomach of the 

 gibbons, and the number of other characters 

 in which the various several forms of higher 

 or lower Primates respectively approximate to 

 man. 



" But to assert this is as much as to say that 

 low down in the scale of Primates was an an- 

 cestral form so like man that it might well be 

 called an homunculus ; and we have the virtual 

 "pre-existence of man's body supposed, in order 

 to account for the actual first appearance of 

 that body as we know it : a supposition mani- 

 festly absurd if put forward as an explanation." * 



19. Nor is it an insignificant circumstance, 

 1 M Lessons from Nature," p. 176. 



