the same author says:
But it is not so easy to see how this difference of physical structure arose, and how a being came into existence which had such a brain and hand, and such undeveloped capabilities for an almost unlimited progress. The difficulty is this: the difference in structure between the lowest existing race of man and the highest existing ape is too great to admit of the possibility of one being the direct descendant of the other. The negro in some respects makes a slight approximation towards the Simian type. His skull is narrower, his brain less capacious, his muzzle more projecting, his arm longer than those of the average European man. Still he is essentially a man, and separated by a wide gulf from the chimpanzee or the gorilla. Even the idiot or crétin, whose brain is no larger and intelligence no greater than that of the chimpanzee, is an arrested man, not an ape.
If, therefore, the Darwinian theory holds good in the case of man and ape, we must go back to some common ancestor from whom both may have originated.... But to establish this as a fact and not a theory we require to find that ancestral form, or, at any rate, some intermediate forms tending towards it ... in other words ... the “missing link.” Now it must be admitted that, hitherto, not only have no such missing links been discovered, but the oldest known human skulls and skeletons which date from the Glacial period, and are probably at least 100,000 years old, show no very decided approximation towards any such pre-human type. On the contrary, one of the oldest types, that of the men of the sepulchral cave of Cro-Magnon,[1617] is that of a fine race, tall in stature, large in brain, and on the whole superior to many of the existing races of mankind. The reply of course is that the time is insufficient, and if man and the ape had a common ancestor, that as a highly developed anthropoid ape, certainly, and man, probably, already existed in the Miocene period, such ancestor must be sought still further back at a distance compared with which the whole Quaternary period sinks into insignificance.... All this is true, and it may well make us hesitate before we admit that man ... is alone an exception to the general law of the universe, and is the creature of a special creation. This is the more difficult to believe, as the ape family which man so closely resembles [?] in physical structure contains numerous branches which graduate into one another, but the extremes of which differ more widely than man does from the highest of the ape series. If a special creation is required for man, must there not have been special creations for the chimpanzee, the gorilla, the orang, and for at least 100 different species of apes and monkeys which are all built on the same lines?[1618]
There was a “special creation” for man, and a “special creation” for the ape, his progeny; only on other lines than ever bargained for by Science. Albert Gaudry and others give some weighty reasons why man cannot be regarded as the crown of an ape-stock. When one finds that not only was the “primeval savage” (?) a reality in the Miocene times, but that, as de Mortillet shows, the flint relics he has [pg 717] left behind him were splintered by fire in that remote epoch; when we learn that the dryopithecus, alone of the anthropoids, appears in those strata, what is the natural inference? That the Darwinians are in a quandary. The very man-like gibbon is still in the same low grade of development, as it was when it coëxisted with man at the close of the Glacial period. It has not appreciably altered since the Pliocene times. Now there is little to choose between the dryopithecus and the existing anthropoids—gibbon, gorilla, etc. If, then, the Darwinian theory is all-sufficient, how are we to “explain” the evolution of this ape into man during the first half of the Miocene? The time is far too short for such a theoretical transformation. The extreme slowness with which variation in species supervenes renders the thing inconceivable—more especially on the “natural selection” hypothesis. The enormous mental and structural gulf between a savage acquainted with fire and the mode of kindling it, and a brutal anthropoid, is too great to bridge even in idea, during so contracted a period. Let the Evolutionists push back the process into the preceding Eocene, if they prefer to do so; let them even trace both man and dryopithecus to a common ancestor; the unpleasant consideration has, nevertheless, to be faced that in Eocene strata the anthropoid fossils are as conspicuous by their absence, as is the fabulous pithecanthropus of Hæckel. Is an exit out of this cul de sac to be found by an appeal to the “unknown,” and a reference, with Darwin, to the “imperfection of the geological record”? So be it; but the same right of appeal must then be equally accorded to the Occultists, instead of remaining the monopoly of puzzled Materialism. Physical man, we say, existed before the first bed of the Cretaceous rocks was deposited. In the early part of the Tertiary age, the most brilliant civilization the world has ever known flourished at a period when the Hæckelian man-ape is conceived as roaming through primeval forests, and Mr. Grant Allen's putative ancestor as swinging himself from bough to bough with his hairy mates, the degenerated Liliths of the Third Race Adam. Yet there were no anthropoid apes in the brighter days of the civilization of the Fourth Race; but Karma is a mysterious law, and no respecter of persons. The monsters bred in sin and shame by the Atlantean Giants, “blurred copies” of their bestial sires, and hence of modern man, according to Huxley, now mislead and overwhelm with error the speculative Anthropologist of European Science.
Where did the first men live? Some Darwinists say in Western [pg 718] Africa, some in Southern Asia, others again believe in an independent origin of human stocks in Asia and America from a simian ancestry. Hæckel, however, advances gaily to the charge. Starting from his prosimia, “the ancestor common to all other catarrhini including man”—a “link” now, however, disposed of for good by recent anatomical discoveries—he endeavours to find a habitat for the primeval pithecanthropus alalus.
In all probability it [the transformation of animal into man] occurred in Southern Asia, in which region many evidences are forthcoming that here was the original home of the different species of man. Probably Southern Asia itself was not the earliest cradle of the human race, but Lemuria, a continent that lay to the south of Asia, and sank later on beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean. The period during which the evolution of the anthropoid apes into ape-like men took place was probably the last part of the Tertiary period, the Pliocene age, and perhaps the Miocene age, its forerunner.[1619]
Of the above speculations, the only one of any worth is that referring to Lemuria, which was the cradle of mankind—of the physical sexual creature who materialized through long æons out of the ethereal hermaphrodites. Only, if it is proved that Easter Island is an actual relic of Lemuria, we must believe that according to Hæckel the “dumb ape-men,” just removed from a brutal mammalian monster, built the gigantic portrait-statues, two of which are now in the British Museum. Critics are mistaken in terming Hæckelian doctrines “abominable, revolutionary, immoral”—though Materialism is the legitimate outcome of the ape-ancestor myth—they are simply too absurd to demand disproof.
B. Western Evolutionism: The Comparative Anatomy Of Man And The Anthropoid In No Way A Confirmation Of Darwinism.
We are told that while every other heresy against Modern Science may be disregarded, this, our denial of the Darwinian theory as applied to man, will be the one “unpardonable” sin. The Evolutionists stand firm as rock on the evidence of similarity of structure between the ape and man. The anatomical evidence, it is urged, is quite overpowering in this case; it is bone for bone, and muscle for muscle, even the brain conformation being very much the same.