We appeal to the common, every-day man of fair judgment: Which takes more faith, or if preferred, credulity, the accepting of that strange, complex, unauthenticated account of man's origin or the simple and, with an omnipotent God in mind, entirely possible account of the Bible? "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life: and man became a living soul." Which is the more noble, the more satisfying to our desires for a high and divine origin as well as high and divine destiny?
6. THE MISSING LINK.
The Missing Link is the great desideratum of Evolution, for the evolutionist indignantly disclaims the present apes or monkey as ancestors. He tells us the connecting link was a creature superior to these. But of which he is unable to show any specimen. It is purely mythical. We have the remains of millions of animals reaching through all the ages and why is this particular specimen wanting?
Dr. Rudolph Virchow, the great discoverer of the germ theory, has for thirty years, according to Haeckel, "opposed the theory of man's descent from the brute." (Last Link, p. 27.) He himself says: "The intermediate form is unimaginable save in a dream.... We cannot teach or consent that it is an achievement that man has descended from the ape or other animal." (Homiletic Review, January, 1901.)
Dr. Friedrich Pfaff, professor of natural sciences in the University of Erlangen, writes on the question as follows: "Nowhere in the older deposits is an ape that approximates more closely to man, or man that approximates more closely to an ape, or perhaps a man at all. The same gulf which is found to-day between man and the ape goes back with undiminished breadth and depth to the tertiary period. This fact alone is sufficient to make its unintelligibleness clear to every one who is not penetrated by the conviction of the infallibility of the theory of the gradual transmutation of and progressive development of all organized creatures. If, however, we now find one of the most man-like apes (gibbon) in the tertiary period, and this species is still in the same low grade, and side by side with it, at the end of the ice period, man is found in the same high grade as to-day, the ape not having approximated more nearly to man, and modern man not having become further removed from the ape than the first man, every one who is in a position to draw a right conclusion can infer, that the facts contradict a theory of constant progression, development and ceaselessly increasing variation from generation to generation, as surely as it is possible to do." (Age and Origin of Man, Am. Tr. Soc., p. 52.)
From time to time the discovery of the "missing link" is announced and telegraphed through the civilized world, only to be remanded to its place among the remains of brutes or men. We will consider the instances of such as they have been presented:
1. The Calaveras Skull now in the California State Museum. This has been shown recently to be a hoax. It was placed in a mine shaft 150 feet deep, by Mr. R. C. Scribner, a storekeeper at the mine, as a practical joke. This he lately acknowledged to the Rev. W. H. Dyer, of Los Angeles, a clergyman of the Episcopal church.
2. The Neanderthal Skull. This was found in 1856 in Prussia. It had narrow receding forehead and thick ridges over the eyes. It was claimed by the evolutionists as from two to three hundred thousand years old. Dr. Meyer of Bonn examined the evidence, and found it to be the skull of a Cossack killed in 1814. Many other scientists agreed with him. (Bible Science and Faith, p. 278.)
3. The Colorado specimen. Prof. Stephen Bowers of the Mineralogical and Geological Survey of California, gives this account of another such discovery: "A few years ago the newspapers contained an account of the discovery of a skeleton in Colorado, by a Columbia College professor, which he was pleased to call the 'missing link' between man and the apes. He gave this remarkable creature an antiquity of a million and a half of years. The friable bones were carefully wrapped in cotton and shipped east. But scarcely had the learned professor gotten away with his prize when certain cowboys came forward and claimed the bones to be that of a pet monkey which they buried but a dozen years previously."
4. The late find of skeletons at Croatia, Austria, is heralded as the discovery of a connecting link. But these are skeletons of men and not of brutes. They are degraded men and nothing is better known than the possibility of degeneracy in man. We have degenerates now with all the peculiarities of these low specimens, retreating brows and jaws and flat faces. Degeneracy does not prove evolution. While the shape of these skulls is low and long it has not been shown that their cubical capacity is much less than that of normal man.