THE LAWS OF DESCENT 103 



into the shape of man. The laws of the survival of the fittest 

 and of heredity, and of the whole hypothesis of the Creation 

 by God's Trinity, forbids such a possibility, which would 

 frustrate the laws that God has made binding ever since the 

 completion of form, shape and species became fixed, viz., that 

 like begets like. Hence we may conclude that all apes who 

 by that time evolved to the perfection of the apes who became 

 man, became men. Probably an ape somewhere between the 

 Gibbon and the Anthropoid monkey, or possibly two or three 

 of the Anthropoids, but other varieties for want of courage or 

 energy, or from not seeking a meat diet, combined with their 

 failures to attain a perfect upright posture during the periods 

 when violent changes of shape were admissible, failed to merit 

 the reward due to such perfections in such acts as were the 

 virtues of the age, and failed, therefore, to evolve in like 

 manner or to become men. We may liken them to the horses, 

 which instead of fighting a gallant race, run off the race-course 

 and so get left out of the running. So also the animals that 

 mated with a preponderance of inferior animal species during 

 these periods degenerated into inferior forms of animal exist- 

 ences (this will be further explained in Book II. when we 

 follow the course of evolution). But at present I wish to con- 

 fine my remarks more to the subject of the present chapter, 

 the Laws of Descent. 



Until the time when the final changes of species, shape 

 and form gave way before the birth of mind, in every case 

 as each kind of animal loses its value in the plan of evolution 

 or fails to strive for further perfection of energy and brain, 

 it does and will become extinct to make room for the more 

 perfect animal that has evolved on better and more perfect 

 lines than the one it has chosen and selected to follow. Thus 

 the more energetic apes that studied to swing themselves from 

 bough to bough instead of crawling along them, and subse- 

 quently, when they had thereby evolved an upright posture, 

 descended to the ground and were bold enough to strive to hold 

 their own against the more formidable reptiles and the animals 

 which roamed the earth and which consequently took to a meat 

 diet, superseded those of their less courageous colleagues who 

 chose to remain in the security of an arboreal life and luxuriate 

 in fruit diet during the earlier stages of existence. While 

 the other animals, although man's superiors at the start in 



