MAN A PRIMATE 17 



guilty of many foolish and disgraceful things. 

 But this attempt by him to repudiate his ancestors 

 by surreptitiously fabricating for himself an origin 

 different from, and more glorious than, the rest is 

 one of the most absurd and scandalous in the 

 whole list. It is a shallow logic — the logic of 

 those who, without worth of their own, try to 

 shine with a false and stolen lustre. No more 

 masterly rebuke was ever administered to those in 

 the habit of sneering at the truth in this matter 

 than the caustic reply of Huxley to the taunt of 

 the fat-witted Bishop — that he would rather be 

 the descendant of a respectable ape than the 

 descendant of one who not only closed his eyes 

 to the facts around him, but used his official 

 position to persuade others to do likewise. Man's 

 reluctance to take his anatomical place beside his 

 simian kinspeople has been exceeded only by his 

 selfish and high-handed determination to exclude 

 all other terrestrial beings from his heaven. 



Man is a talkative and religious ape. He is an 

 ape, but with a much greater amount of enterprise 

 and with a greater likelihood of being found in 

 every variety of climate. Like the anthropoid, 

 man has a bald face and an obsolete tail. But he 

 is distinguished from his arboreal relative by his 

 arrogant bearing, his skilled larynx, and especially 

 by the satisfaction he experiences in the con- 

 templation of the image which appears when he 

 looks in a mirror. 



The man-like apes are from three to six feet tall, 

 and are all of them very strong, the gorilla, who 



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