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many a claim to be oiir shadow refracted, as it were, through 
a Lemurine prism. 
The lower American Apes meet us with what seems “ the 
front of Jove himself,” compared with the gigantic but low- 
browed denizens of tropical Western Africa. 
In fact, in the words of the illustrious Dutch naturalists, 
Messrs. Schroeder, Van der Kolk, and Yrolik,* the lines of 
affinity existing between different Primates construct rather 
a network than a ladder. 
It is indeed a tangled web, the meshes of which no naturalist 
has as yet unravelled by the aid of natural selection. Nay, 
more, these complex affinities form such a net for the use of 
the teleological retiarius as it will be difficult for his Lucretian 
antagonist to evade, even with the countless turns and doublings 
of Darwinian evolutions. 
But, it may be replied, the spontaneous and independent 
appearance of these similar structures, is due to “ atavism ” and 
“ reversion ” — to the reappearance, that is, in modern descend- 
ants, of ancient and sometimes long-lost structural characters, 
which formerly existed in more or less remote hypothetical 
ancestors. 
Let us see to what this reply brings us. If it is true and if 
Man and the Orang are diverging descendants of a creature 
with certain cerebral characters, then that remote ancestor 
must also have had the wrist of the Chimpanzee, the voice of a 
long-armed Ape, the blade-bone of the Grorilla, the chin of the 
Siamang, the skull-dome of an American Ape, the ischium of a 
slender Loris, the whiskers and beard of a Saki, the liver and 
stomach of the Gibbons, and the number of other characters 
before detailed, in which the various several forms of higher or 
lower Primates respectively approximate to Man. 
But to assert this is as much as to say that low down in the 
scale of Primates was an ancestral form, so like man that it 
might well be called an homunculus ; and we have the virtual 
pre-existence of man’s body supposed, in order to account for 
the actual first appearance of that body as we know it — a sup- 
position manifestly absurd if put forward as an explanation. 
Nor if such an homunculus had really existed, would it 
suffice to account for the difficulty. For it must be borne in 
mind that man is only one of many peculiar forms. The body 
of the Orang is as exceptional in its way, as is that of man 
in another. The little Tarsier has even a more exceptional 
structure than has man himself. Now, all these exceptional 
forms show cross relations and complex dependencies as involved 
and puzzling as does the human structure, so that in each 
several case we should meet with a similar network of diffi- 
* ^‘Nat. Hist. Review,” vol. ii. p. 117. 
