‘No, not actually descended.’
‘How very curious!’
‘Fancy! This is something quite new.’
‘They certainly ought not to have attacked Genesis till they were more sure of their ground.’
‘How amusing of them to call it the Missing Link!’
‘Sort o’ pun, eh?’
‘But what’s the story, Sir Peter?’
‘I’m coming to that.... Now, we may roughly put the date of the Missing Link from which we are descended at about three hundred million years ago.’
An ‘Oh!’ of disappointment ran round the ladies. The representative of the ‘Flywheel’ gave a ‘Humph!’ and walked off, to look at himself in the glass.
‘But wait a moment,’ said the Biologist. ‘Though improbable, it is not impossible that the species from which, by differentiation, arose men on the one hand and apes on the other, should have continued its existence, undifferentiated, at the same time. And the rumour is that there is at least one specimen of the race still alive; and, what is more, that he was lately in the possession of an American, and on the eve of being shipped to England for exhibition.’