AND THE APE THEORY, 43 



truth by taking into consideration and comparison the 

 other possible hypotheses. But in fact no single 

 opponent of the ape-hypothesis has been able to 

 combat it with any other phylogenetic hypothesis that 

 has the faintest glimmer of probability. Not one 

 opponent has suggested, or can suggest, any other 

 animal form that can serve as our nearest ancestor 

 'than the ape. No one has ever reproached me by 

 saying that Mother Nature has endowed me with too 

 little imagination; on the contrary, I am often accused 

 of having a superfluity of that gift of the gods ; but I 

 have often and repeatedly exerted my imagination to 

 picture to myself any known or unknown animal-form 

 as the nearest parent-form to man in the place of the 

 apes, and have always found myself under the neces- 

 sity of falling back upon the stock of apes. Let me 

 conceive of the outward conformation and the internal 

 structure of the nearest mammalian ancestors of men 

 as I will, I am always forced to acknowledge that this 

 hypothetical parent-form ranges under the zoologically- 

 conceived order of apes, and cannot possibly be 

 separated from the Simiadce or Primates. If, in spite 

 of this, any one chooses, out of a " personal crotchet," 

 to accept some other series of unknown animal ancestors 

 of man that have nothing to do with apes, that is but 

 a mere empty hypothesis floating in the air. Our ape- 

 hypothesis, on the other hand, is objectively and 



