704 
INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS. 
failed it, and it learned to nestle among sucli litter as it could 
collect in dens and caves, and to seize and devour such weaker 
animals as it could overtake and master. At the same time 
its lower extremities, no longer used for climbing trees, but 
for walking on the ground, gained in strength and size; its 
arms diminished ; and its development to maturity being 
delayed by the intensity of the struggle for existence, its 
brain enlarged, it became more cunning and sagacious, and 
even learned to use weapons of wood or stone to destroy its 
victims. So it gradually grew into a fierce and terrible 
creature, f neither beast nor human,’ combining the habits 
of a bear and the agility of a monkey with some glimmerings 
of the cunning and resources of a savage. 
“When the Glacial period passed away,our nameless simian 
man, or manlike ape, might naturally be supposed to revert to 
its original condition, and to establish itself as of old in the 
new forests of the modern period. For some unknown reason, 
however, perhaps because it had gone too far in the path of im¬ 
provement to be able to turn back, this reversion did not take 
place. On the contrary, the ameliorated circumstances and 
wider range of the new continents enabled it still further to 
improve. Ease and abundance perfected what struggle and 
privation had begun; it added to the rude arts of the Glacial 
time; it parted with the shaggy hair now unnecessary ; its 
features became softer; and it returned in part to vegetable 
food. Language sprang up from the attempt to articulate 
natural sounds. Fire-making was invented and new arts 
arose. 
“ At length the spiritual nature, potentially present in 
the creature, was awakened by some access of fear, or some 
grand and terrible physical phenomenon; the idea of a 
higher intelligence was struck out, and the descendant of 
apes became a superstitious and idolatrous savage. 
“ Flow much trouble and discussion would have been saved 
had he been aware of his humble origin, and never entertained 
the vain imagination that he was a child of God, rather than a 
mere product of physical evolution. It is, indeed, curious, 
that at this point evolutionism, like theism, has its f fall of 
man for surely the awakening of the religious sense and 
of the knowledge of good and evil must on that theory be so 
designated, since it subverted in the case of man the pre¬ 
vious regular operations of natural selection, and introduced 
all that debasing superstition, priestly domination, and 
religious controversy which have been among the chief 
curses of our race, and which are doubly accursed if, as the 
evolutionist believes, they are not the ruins of something 
