16 THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY NATURAL SELECTION. 



apes as well as the man are represented as standing erect. 

 It would have been more consonant with nature if the apes 

 had been represented as going on all-fours, and, better still, 

 had they been shoAvn in the act of climbing a tree, or hang- 

 ing from one of its branches. While Professor Huxley, as a 

 supporter of the Darwinian theory, considers the anthropoid 

 apes — the gorilla at the head of them — as the nearest approach 

 to man, he fully admits that a wide gulf separates them ; and, 

 with the candour of a genuine philosopher, he thus expresses 

 himself on the subject : ' Let me take this opportunity of 

 directly asserting that the diirerences are great and significant 

 — that every bone of the gorilla bears marks by which it may 

 be distinguished from the corresponding bones of a man, and 

 that in the present creation, at any rate, no intermediate link 

 bridges over the gap between man and the troglodytes.' ' No 

 one,' he adds, ' is more convinced than I am of the vastness of 

 the gulf between civilised man and the brutes, or is more certain 

 that, whether from them or not, he is assuredly not of them.' 

 But let us for a moment indulge in the belief that the 

 Darwinian theory has, through the creation of a being or 

 beings superior to apes, but inferior to man, bridged over the 

 chasm which now separates them, and that the masterpiece 

 of organic existence is at length reached ; still man is but a 

 generic term, for he is divided into many races, or, speaking 

 more correctly, into many species, greatly differing among 

 themselves in bodily and mental attributes. It was incum- 

 bent, therefore, on the theory to show that such differences 

 were brought about by ' natural selection in the struggle for 

 life,' and to mdicate with which of the n^iany races tiie 

 mutation began ; or, in other words, which of the races it is 

 that stands nearest to the apes. It makes no attempt of the 

 kind ; it simply makes a man out of a monkey and of some- 

 thing else as yet unknown, leaving mankind an indiscrimi- 

 nate hodge-podge ; and so, therefore, the Darwinian theoiy, 

 except in so far as it provokes enquirj', is of no value to 

 ethnQloa;v or the natural historv of man. 



