MAN AND APES. 
259 
culties, if we sought to account for existing structural charac- 
ters through the influence of inheritance and natural selection. 
It may be replied that certain of these characters have 
arisen in total independence, and this reply is no doubt true ; 
but how are we to discriminate between those which are 
inherited and those which are independently acquired ? Struc- 
tm’es like strong teeth or powerful claws, obviously useful in 
the struggle for life, may well be supposed to have inde- 
pendently appeared, and been preserved time after time ; but 
what characters could well be thought, a priori, less likely to 
be independently acquired than a more or less developed chin, 
such as Man shares with the Siamang alone, or a slightly aqui- 
line nose, such as that found in the Hoolock Oibbon and often 
in the human species ? Can either character be thought to 
have preserved either species in the struggle for life, or have 
persistently gained the hearts of successive generations of 
female G^ibbons ? Certainly seductiveness of this sort will never 
explain the arrangement of the lobes of the liver, or the presence 
of an oblique ridge on the grinding surfaces of the back teeth. 
Again, can this oblique ridge of the grinding teett be sup- 
posed to have arisen through life necessities ? and yet, if it is 
a real sign of genetic affinity, how comes it to be absent from 
the man-like Gibbons, and to reappear for the first time in 
American Apes, and among others in the aberrant and more or 
less baboon-like Howling Monkeys ? 
The same remark applies to the condition of wrist bones of 
man, the Chimpanzee, and Indris. If this condition arises 
independently, and is no mark whatever of genetic affinity, what 
other single character can with certainty be deemed to be valid 
evidence of affinity of the kind ? 
But if the foregoing facts and considerations tell against a 
belief in the origin of Man and Apes, by the purely accidental 
preservation in the struggle of life of minute and fortuitous 
structural variations, do they tell against the doctrine of evolu- 
tion generally ? 
To this question it must be replied that, if we have reason 
to think an innate law has been imposed upon nature, by which 
new and definite species, under definite conditions, emerge 
from a latent and potential being into actual and manifest 
existence, then the foregoing facts do not in the least tell 
against such a conception — a conception, that is, of a real and 
true process of “ evolution ” or “ unfolding.” 
For there is no conceivable reason why these latent specific 
forms should not have the most complex and involved rela- 
tionships one to another ; similar structures independently 
appearing in widely different instances. 
Analogy drawn from the inorganic world is all in favour of 
s 2 
