SIXTH DAY'S SITTING*. 145 



subdue the world and fill it with monuments of his art 

 and skill. There would have been no naturalist devoting 

 a life-time to the study of the instincts, and habits, and 

 anatomy of the lower animals ; fancying he has discovered 

 that he himself, instead of having a celestial origin, is one 

 in nature with those lower animals, and sprung from the 

 same primal stock : hence, searching among extinct brute 

 species for his pedigree ; persuading himself, and trying to 

 persuade others, that he has found it ; and then writing 

 down the links of which he imagines the chain of his descent 

 to be composed, though he is unable to find a fossil 

 skeleton, or even a fossil bone, to prove that any one of 

 those links is a reality ! 



Those who accept Mr. Darwin's account of the descent of 

 man must accept along with it not a little that is, if 

 possible, even more incredible. For example, while a 

 certain monkey race has, by a series of insensible gradations, 

 occurring during a period of enormous length, developed 

 into man, other monkey races, during a yet longer period, 

 have remained monkeys, making no progress whatever ! 

 Mr. Darwin, I presume, would maintain that at least half 

 a million of years have passed since man emerged into 

 humanity from the last of his ape-like progenitors. How 

 far remote, then, must be the time when the ape from 

 which man has descended, branched away from the stem of 

 the Old World monkeys ! But during this period so long 

 that, to us, it is practically an eternity Old World monkeys 

 have remained Old World monkeys, with the solitary 

 exception of that wonderful member of the ancient series of 

 the JPrimates, with his plastic frame, of which Mr. Darwin 

 catches " an obscure glance" through the dim vista of ages. 



In accepting Mr. Darwin's hypothesis then, we must 

 believe that, since this creature, millions upon millions of 



