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Although the physical connection between man and the anthro- 
poids is admittedly so close, intellectually the gap between them is 
immense ; but this has never been denied, and the force of 
Mr. Darwin’s argument remains, that granting this, man’s mental 
and even moral attributes are present in a feeble and undeveloped 
condition in the lower animals ; it is not only man’s bodily frame 
that bears a family likeness to that of the rest of creation ; animals 
not only possess in a rudimentary form the various mental emotions 
and faculties which are in a higher degree characteristic of man, 
but the reverse of this also obtains, for there is no animal instinct 
or passion which is not also characteristic of man. When we 
reflect that, even in the nineteenth century, international disputes 
are, as a rule, settled by the brutal arbitrament of war, it is difficult 
to escape the conclusion, that notwithstanding the ameliorating 
influence of ages of civilization and religion, man still retains very 
strong evidence indeed of his animal origin. 
I can but just allude in passing to the question which has often 
been put in this city, and which Dr. Bateman again asks : Why 
arc not the fossil skeletons forthcoming of the missing links be- 
tween man and his supposed ancestors? But I would remark that 
this objection is not urged by those who practically know how 
excessively fragmentary the geological record is, and how rarely even 
in modern deposits are the bones of man and of recent mammalia 
preserved. Let me remind you that of all the numerous inhabi- 
tants of Great Britain during the early stone period, only one 
doubtful bone has ever been met with, yet who would argue there 
were no palaeolithic men, because we cannot find their skeletons ? 
Take another case : the various European races of the Indo- 
Germanic family, on the one hand, and the Hindoos and Persians 
on the other, are doubtless descended from a common ancestry, but 
this cannot be proved by fossil evidence, and the absence of proof 
of this kind has never been brought forward as any difficulty in 
the way of such a belief. It is not only the parentage of these 
races of men that cannot thus be proved ; a similar remark may 
be made respecting the languages spoken by them. There is no 
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