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between man and the lower animals — no form or 

 forms that can be said to stand intermediate between 

 the lower grades of humanity and the highest known 

 forms of quadrumana. It may be argued, as is some- 

 times done, that the difference between the lowest 

 men and the highest quadrumana is not so wide as 

 that between the highest civilised man and the lowest 

 savage. StUl, narrow as the gulf may be, science has 

 yet no indication of any intermediate form to bridge 

 it over — no trace of a higher quadrumane, none of a 

 lower man than stone-fashioning, cave-dwelling savages. 

 It is true that the areas of geological research have as 

 yet been extremely limited and partial, and scarcely, 

 if at all, in the latitudes assigned to the anthropoid 

 quadrumana. It is also true that, so far as palaeon- 

 tology has yet given testimony, the ascensive de- 

 velopment of the higher animals is more rapid than 

 that of the lower, or in other words, that they pass 

 through fewer stages into new species ; and in this 

 case the intermediate stages of man's ascent are 

 scarcely to be expected, and even these only within 

 those regions which are now, or have been since the 

 tertiary epoch, the head-quarters of the higher quad- 

 rumana. And further, it may also be true, as some 

 contend, " that nature can produce a new tjrpe with- 

 out our being able to see the marks of transition, and 

 that she can alter a whole race simultaneously with- 



