THE GORILLA AND OTHER APES. 521 



the inquiry to these difficulties, which remain, and are likely 

 long to remain, insuperable. 



So far, however, are the considerations above urged from 

 introducing any new or insuperable objection to the Dar- 

 winian theory, that, rightly understood, they indicate the 

 true answer to an objection which has been urged by Mivart 

 and others against the belief that man has descended from 

 some ape-like progenitor. 



Mivart shows that no existing ape or monkey approaches 

 man more nearly in all respects than other races, but that 

 one resembles man more closely in some respects, another 

 in others, a third in yet others, and so forth. " The ear 

 lobule of the gorilla makes him our cousin," he says, " but 

 his tongue is eloquent in his own dispraise." If the " bridg- 

 ing convolutions of the orang['s brain] go to sustain his 

 claim to supremacy, they also go far to sustain a similar 

 claim on the part of the long-tailed thumbless spider- 

 monkeys. If the obliquely ridged teeth of Simla and Trog- 

 lodytes (the chimpanzee) point to community of origin, how 

 can we deny a similar community of origin, as thus esti- 

 mated, to the howling monkeys and galagos ? The liver of 

 the gibbons proclaims them almost human ; that of the 

 gorilla declares him comparatively brutal The lower 

 American apes meet us with what seems the ' front of Jove 

 himself,' compared with the gigantic but low-browed denizens 

 of tropical Western Africa." 



He concludes that the existence of these wide-spread 

 signs of affinity and the associated signs of divergence, dis- 

 prove the theory that the structural characters existing in 

 the human frame have had their origin in the influence of 

 inheritance and "natural selection." "In the words of the 

 illustrious Dutch naturalists, Messrs. Schroeder, Van der 

 Kolk and Vrolik," he says, "the lines of affinity existing 

 between different Primates construct rather a network than 

 a ladder. It is indeed a tangled web, the meshes of which 

 no naturalist has as yet unravelled by the aid of natural 

 selection. Nay, more, these complex affinities form such a 



Y 



