Now man and apes present a very striking contrast in respect to type. Their organs ... correspond almost exactly term for term: but these organs are arranged after a very different plan. In man they are so arranged that he is essentially a walker, while in apes they necessitate his being a climber.... There is here an anatomical and mechanical distinction.... A glance at the page where Huxley has figured side by side a human skeleton and the skeletons of the most highly developed apes is a sufficiently convincing proof.
The consequence of these facts, from the point of view of the logical application of the law of permanent characterizations, is that man cannot be descended from an ancestor who is already characterized as an ape, any more than a catarrhine tailless ape can be descended from a tailed catarrhine. A walking animal cannot be descended from a climbing one. This was clearly understood by Vogt.
In placing man among the primates, he declares without hesitation that the lowest class of apes have passed the landmark (the common ancestor), from which the different types of this family have originated and diverged. [This ancestor of the apes, Occult Science sees in the lowest human group during the Atlantean period, as shown before.] We must, then, place the origin of man beyond the last ape [corroborating our doctrine], if we wish to adhere to one of the laws most emphatically necessary to the Darwinian theory. We then come to the prosimiæ of Hæckel, the loris, indris, etc. But these animals also are climbers; we must go further, therefore, in search of our first direct ancestor. But the genealogy by Hæckel brings us from the latter to the marsupials. From men to the kangaroo the distance is certainly great. Now neither living nor extinct fauna show the intermediate types which ought to serve as landmarks. This difficulty [pg 705]causes but slight embarrassment to Darwin.[1590] We know that he considers the want of information upon similar questions as a proof in his favour. Hæckel doubtless is as little embarrassed. He admits the existence of an absolutely theoretical pithecoid man.
Thus, since it has been proved that, according to Darwinism itself, the origin of man must be placed beyond the eighteenth stage, and since it becomes, in consequence, necessary to fill up the gap between marsupials and man, will Hæckel admit the existence of four unknown intermediate groups instead of one? Will he complete his genealogy in this manner? It is not for me to answer.[1591]
But see Hæckel's famous genealogy, in The Pedigree of Man, called by him the “Ancestral Series of Man.” In the “Second Division” (eighteenth stage) he describes—
Prosimiæ, allied to the Loris (Stenops) and Makis (Lemur), without marsupial bones and cloaca, with placenta.[1592]
And now turn to de Quatrefages' The Human Species,[1593] and see his proofs, based on the latest discoveries, to show that the Prosimiæ of Hæckel have no decidua and a diffuse placenta. They cannot be the ancestors of the apes even, let alone man, according to a fundamental law of Darwin himself, as the great French Naturalist shows. But this does not dismay the “animal theorists” in the least, for self-contradiction and paradoxes are the very soul of modern Darwinism. Witness—Mr. Huxley; having himself shown, with regard to fossil man and the “missing link,” that:
Neither in Quaternary ages nor at the present time does any intermediary being fill the gap which separates man from the Troglodyte;
and that to “deny the existence of this gap would be as reprehensible as absurd,” the great man of Science denies his own words in actu by supporting with all the weight of his scientific authority that most “absurd” of all theories—the descent of man from an ape!
Says de Quatrefages: