LEAF AND TENDRIL 



still more primitive races, and that these too had 

 their still more savage and bestial forbears ? When 

 started on the back track of his own race, where 

 could he stop? Could he stop anywhere? The 

 neolithic man stands on the shoulders of the pa- 

 leolithic, and he on a still lower human or semi- 

 human form, till we come to a manlike ape or an 

 apelike man, living in trees and subsisting on roots 

 and nuts and wild fruits. Every child born to-day, 

 by the grip of its hands, the strength of its arms, 

 and the weakness of its legs, hints of those far-off 

 arboreal ancestors. Carlyle must also have known 

 that in his fetal. or prenatal lite there was a time 

 when his embryo could not have been distinguished 

 from that of a dog, to say nothing of a monkey. 

 Was this fact also intolerable to him ? 



It must be a bitter pill to persons of Carlyle's 

 temperament to have to accept the account of their 

 own human origin; that the stork legend of the 

 baby is, after all, not good natural history. The 

 humble beginning of each of us is not one that 

 appeals to the imagination, nor to the religious 

 sentiment, nor to our love of the mysterious and 

 the remote, yet the evidence in favor of its truth 

 is pretty strong. 



In fact, the Darwinian theory of the origin of man 



differs from the popular one just as the natural 



history of babies as we all know it differs from the 



account in the nursery legends, and gives about 



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