i88o.] 
Mental Evolution. 
555 
the lower animals, and which the school of Mr. Mivart deny 
being the product of Evolution at all ; for though I agree 
with Mr. Romanes in thinking that they are, I differ from 
him as to the proofs on which that opinion should rest. 
It matters little for the present argument in what these 
phenomena consist, since the fadt that there is a wide gap 
which separates the highest phenomena of the mind of man 
from those of the lower animals is admitted by all. Now 
the line of argument adopted by Mr. Romanes was to show 
how that gap might be intelligibly filled in by a series of 
hypothetical connefting-links, — highly-developed anthropoid 
apes, predecessors of man as we now find him pretty much 
the same all over the world, or at any rate without anything 
that can be called a break in his mental continuity, — and 
was of opinion that if he succeeded in doing so it was as 
good as showing that the gap had been filled in, taking into 
consideration that up to the point when the gap began 
Mental Evolution was an admitted fa and Organic Evolu- 
tion was admitted in its entirety. It is not necessary here 
to say anything of the way in which he accomplished his 
task ; we will admit that it was done as well as it was pos- 
sible to do it, and that the process he described was one 
which might actually have happened, and that speaking 
apes really did exist. It may in passing be stated that, only 
a few days before Mr. Romanes told us of his hypothetical 
speaking apes, Prof. Dawkins told his audience, at the 
Geological Society, that certain flint implements found in 
strata anterior to the time when he believed it possible for 
man to have come into existence, must therefore have been 
fashioned by an anthropoid ape, and at all events held that 
this was more probable than that man was then in ex- 
istence. 
Now, supposing Mr. Romanes to have shown how the gap 
in Mental Evolution might have been filled in, I do not 
think this is the way to prove mental or any other kind of 
evolution. When Darwin, twenty-one years ago, endea- 
voured to prove the theory of Evolution as the origin of 
species, he did so not only with a full knowledge of the wide 
and apparently unbridgable gaps separating and isolating 
organisms, and of the then absence of connedting-links, but 
prophesied — and prophesied truly — that this would be the 
great difficulty in the way of the acceptance of his theory. 
But Evolution was true nevertheless, for it depended upon 
two fadts known to everybody from all time, just as it was 
known that apples fell to the ground, but the significance of 
which had never been fully appreciated — first, that every 
