144 PROFESSOR EDWARD HULL, LL.D., F.R.S. 
2. The Origin of Man.—It is worthy of remark that 
Darwin in his work “On the Origin of Species through 
Natural Selection,’ nowhere goes the length of including 
man amongst the results of natural laws working in accord- 
ance with his hypothesis. He states, mdeed, that in the 
distant future, he sees open fields for far more important 
researches than he has undertaken; and that light will be 
thrown on the origin of man and his history.* This instruc- 
tive omission arose—not as Professor Haeckel would have 
us to infer, because Darwin was apprehensive of causing a 
revulsion of feeling amongst his readers if he suggested a 
physical connection between man and the brute creation— 
but, as [ presume, because the great naturalist clearly saw how 
vast is the gulf which separates man from the lower animal 
creation, and that his hypothesis was insufficient to account 
for the mental and, perhaps, even physical distinctions. 
I am vot now entering en the question whether man was 
originally descended from some quadrumanous animal or not. 
If he was, it is perfectly certain that the links which con- 
nected him with the existing quadrumana are altogether 
wanting. No one who compares the skull and skeleton of 
the orang-utan, the gibbon or the gorilla with (for example) 
that of a native African, can suppose that the one could 
have been connected with the other, except by a long series 
of intermediate forms which are not preserved to us. The 
absence of such intermediate forms (supposing them to have 
existed) is the more remarkable, because we cannot in this 
case plead the favourite argument of “the imperfection of 
the geological record;” unless it be asserted (which it may 
be) that the human species descended from the Palwopithecus, 
or Macacus of the Pliocene period through one line of ances- 
tors whose remains have been lost, while the present mon- 
keys have descended through another. But there is really 
no evidence for such an hypothesis; its truth can neither be 
asserted or denied. 
In any case man’s superiority over the brute creation lies 
not so much in differences in his form and structure as in his 
other worlds of life besides our own, he thinks it possible that in some 
collision between this world and a fragment from one of these worlds, 
the seeds of life may have reached the surface of the globe! He admits 
that this view “may seem wild and visionary,” but it only shows how 
hard pressed he must have felt for any explanation from purely natural 
causes to account for the origin of life, when he had to fall back upon 
this. See Rep. Brit. Assoc., 1871, pp. 104 and 105, 
* Loc. cit., p. 518, 
