THE GORILLA AND OTHER APES. 325 



the most civilized being far in advance of the most advanced 

 European races of our time. On the other hand, the gorilla, 

 the chimpanzee, the orang-outang, and the gibbon will pro- 

 bably be extinct or nearly so. True, the men of those days 

 will probably have very exact records of the characteristics 

 not only of the present savage races of man, but of the pre- 

 sent races of apes. Nay, they will probably know of inter- 

 mediate races, long since extinct even now, whose fossil 

 remains geologists hope to discover before long as they have 

 already discovered the remains of an ape as large as man 

 (the Dryopitheeus) which existed in Europe during the 

 Miocene period ; * and more recently the remains of a race 

 of monkeys akin to Macacus, which once inhabited Attica. 

 But although our remote descendants will thus possess 

 means which we do not possess of bridging the gap between 

 the highest races of apes and the lowest races of man, the 

 gap will nevertheless be wider in their time. And tracing 

 backwards the process, which, thus traced forward, shows a 

 widened gap, we see that once the gap must have been much 

 narrower than it is. Lower races of man than any now 

 known once existed on the earth, and also races of apes 

 nearer akin to man than any now existing, even if the pre- 

 sent races of apes are not the degraded descendants of races 

 which, living under more favourable conditions, were better 

 developed after their kind than the gorilla, chimpanzee, 

 orang, and gibbon of the present time. 



It may be, indeed, that in the consideration last sug- 

 gested we may find some assistance in dealing with our diffi- 

 cult problem. It is commonly assumed that the man-like 

 apes are the most advanced members of the Simian family 

 save man alone, and so far as their present condition is con- 

 cerned this may be true. But it is not necessarily the case 



* The Middle Tertiary period the Tertiary, which includes the 

 Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene periods, being the latest of the three 

 great periods recognized by geologists as preceding the present era, 

 which includes the entire history of man as at present known geo- 

 logically. 



