284 THE DOCTRINE OF DESCENT. 
of man and his history,’ and this implies that man must 
be included with other organic beings in any general 
conclusion respecting the manner of his appearance on 
this earth.” 
Nay, Darwin himself has now gone further, and, to 
the terror of all who can scarce imagine man except as 
created shaven and armed with a book on etiquette, he 
has sketched a certainly not flattering, and perhaps in 
many points not correct, portrait of our presumptive 
ancestors in the phase of dawning humanity. 
Before we seriously disciss this serious subject, we will 
take leave to quote a more superficial verdict given by 
a clever essayist.*' “Let us suppose, merely as a joke, 
that Nature, which we see everywhere advancing: from 
the rhost simple to the complex, from the lower to the 
higher, had not suddenly waived this law in the presence 
of man; that she had: not suddenly given up her evolu- 
tion for his sake; that she had not suddenly begun in 
him a new creation ; but that here, as elsewhere, she had 
proceeded quietly, gradually, naturally, and that man 
were thus nothing more than the last link of the inter- 
minable series of animals, nothing more than a ‘de- 
veloped ape. The first thought. that would then 
obtrude itself upon us, would be that the facts were not 
altered in the slightest degree; that man would remain 
as he is, with the same shape, the same face, the same 
gait, the same gestures, the same dispositions, powers, 
feelings, thoughts, and with the same dominion over the 
apes as heretofore. This is very simple, very self-evi- 
dent, but also very important. For it confers.on him— 
on man—the powerful sensation that, as he now is, he is 
a being of a quite peculiar kind, very different from 
