THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY NATURAL SELECTION. 15 



these are not man-like in the order here set down ; for the 

 two first, which in external form bear the least resembhince 

 to man, are by far the most intelligent, while the two last, 

 which make the nearest approach to him, are by far the 

 stupidest; the gorilla, which stands nearest to man, being 

 surpassed in intelligence by many a little monkey with a tail 

 a yard long. 



The chimpanzee and gorilla are African apes, so that 

 Africa had two progenitors, a clever and a stupid one. The 

 gibbon is an ape of continental Asia, so that throughout the 

 whole of that great continent, and for its manifold races 

 of man, there was but one progenitor. The Asiatic islands 

 had two — the gibbon and the orang-utan; or rather three, 

 for it is ascertained that there are two distinct species 

 of the latter. America has no anthropoid monkey at all, 

 so that, to people America and its islands with human 

 beings, the gibbon of India, or the orang-utan of Borneo, 

 had to cross the Atlantic — a feat which their savage 

 and barbarous descendants, after attaining the human form 

 by natural selection, were never able to achieve. The 

 people of Europe, who had no monkeys in their own 

 country, must trace their simian pedigree to the nearest 

 country; and thus Greeks, Romans, Germans, Frenchmen, 

 and Englishmen would have the same immediate progeni- 

 tors as Egyptians, Berbers, Negroes, Abyssinians, and Hot- 

 tentots, and they have to choose between a chimpanzee and 

 a gorilla. Australia, like Europe, had no ape at all ; but as 

 its native inhabitants are among the lowest types of mankind, 

 it ought surely to have had an inferior anthropoid to itself, 

 to show how near a man might be to a monkey. 



A skilful anatomist and eloquent teacher, embracing the 



theory of gradual mutation, has published a work to show 



the connexion which he considers to exist between man and 



the ape.* In this work pictured figures of the skeletons of 



man and the four anthropoid apes are given, in which the 



* 'The Evidences as to Man's Place in Nature.' By Thomas Henry 

 Huxley, F.R.S., 1863. 



