68 FOOT-NOTES TO EVOLUTION. 
No apes nor monkeys now extant could apparently have 
been ancestors of primitive man. None can ever “de- 
velop” into man. As man changes and diverges, race 
from race, so do they. The influence of effort, the in- 
fluence of surroundings, the influence of the sifting 
process of natural selection, each acts upon them as it 
acts upon man. 
The process of evolution is not progress, but better 
adaptation to conditions of life. As man becomes fitted 
for social and civic life, so does the ape 
become fitted for life in the tree tops. 
The movement of monkeys is toward 
“ simianity,” not humanity. The movement of cat life 
is toward felinity, that of the dog races toward caninity. 
Each step in evolution upward or downward, whatever 
it may be, carries each species or type farther from the 
primitive stock. These steps are never retraced. For 
an ape to become a man he must go back to the simple 
characters of the simple common type from which both 
have sprung. These characters are shown in the ape 
baby and in the human embryo in its corresponding 
stages, for ancestral traits lost in the adult are evident 
in the young. This persistence comes through the op- 
eration of the great force of cell memory which we call 
heredity. 
The evidence of biology points to the descent of all 
mammals, of all vertebrates, of all animals, of all or- 
ganic beings, from a common stock. Of all the races of 
animals the anthropoid apes are nearest man. Their 
divergence from the same stock must be comparatively 
recent. Man is the nomadic, the apes are the arboreal, 
branch of the same great family. 
Evolution does not teach that all or any living forms 
are tending toward humanity. It does not teach, as in 
Bishop Wilberforce’s burlesque, “that every favourable 
Not progress, 
but adaptation. 
