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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
been created independently one of the other, and that the 
various common characters they exhibit are but paralle 
adaptive modifications, due simply to similarity as to the 
exigencies of life to which they are respectively exposed. 
Fossil remains, as yet unknown, may bridge over the gulf at 
present existing between these families. It would be a bold 
thing to positively affirm that such will not be discovered when 
we reflect how very few are the extinct animals known to us 
compared with the vast multitudes which have existed, how 
very rarely animal remains are fossilized, and how very rarely 
again such fossils are both accessible and actually found. Never- 
theless, the author believes that it is far more likely that 
tropical geological explorations may reveal to us latisternal Apes 
more human than any now existing, rather than that it will 
bring to our knowledge forms directly connecting the Simiadce 
and Gebidce, 
To return from this digression, the question may be asked, 
“ What is the bearing of all the foregoing facts on the origin 
and affinities of man ? ” 
Man being, as the mind of each man may tell him, an 
existence not only conscious, but conscious of his own con- 
sciousness ; one not only acting on inference, but capable of 
analysing the 'process of inference ; a creature not only capable 
of acting well or ill, but of understanding the ideas “ virtue ” 
and “moral obligation” with their correlatives freedom of 
choice and responsibility — man being all this, it is at once 
obvious that the principal part of his being is his mental 
power. 
In Nature there is nothing great but Man, 
In Man there is nothing great but Mind. 
We must entirely dismiss, then, the conception that mere 
anatomy by itself can have any decisive bearing on the ques- 
tion as to man’s nature and being as a whole. To solve this 
question, recourse must be had to other studies ; that is to say, 
to philosophy, and especially to that branch of it which occu- 
pies itself with mental phenomena — psychology. 
But if man’s being as a whole is excluded from our present 
investigation, man’s body considered by itself, his mere “ massa 
corporea,” may fairly be compared with the bodies of other 
species of his zoological order, and his corporeal affinities thus 
estimated. 
Let us suppose ourselves to be purely immaterial intelli- 
gences, acquainted only with a world peopled like our own, 
except that man had never lived on it, yet into which the dead 
body of a man had somehow been introduced. 
We should, I think, consider such a body to be that of some 
