Well, what of that? All this was known before King Herod; and the writers of the Râmâyana, the poets who sang the prowess and valour of Hanumân, the Monkey-God, “whose feats were great and wisdom never rivalled,” must have known as much about his anatomy and brain as does any Hæckel or Huxley in our modern day. Volumes upon volumes have been written upon this similarity, in antiquity as in more modern times. Therefore, there is nothing new given to the world or to philosophy in such volumes as Mivart's Man and Apes, or Messrs. Fiske and Huxley's defence of Darwinism. But what are those crucial proofs of man's descent from a pithecoid ancestor? If the Darwinian theory is not the true one, we are told, if man and ape do not descend from a common ancestor, then we must explain the reason of:
(i) The similarity of structure between the two; the fact that the higher animal world—man and beast—is physically of one type or pattern.
(ii) The presence of rudimentary organs in man, i.e., traces of former organs now atrophied by disuse. Some of these organs, it is asserted, could not have had any scope for employment, except in a semi-animal, semi-arboreal monster. Why, again, do we find in man those “rudimentary” organs—as useless as its rudimentary wing is to the apteryx of Australia—the vermiform appendix of the cæcum, the ear muscles,[1620] the “rudimentary tail” with which children are still sometimes born, etc.?
Such is the war cry; and the cackle of the smaller fry among the Darwinians is louder, if possible, than even that of the scientific Evolutionists themselves!
Furthermore, the latter—with their great leader Mr. Huxley, and such eminent Zoologists as Mr. Romanes and others—while defending the Darwinian theory, are the first to confess the almost insuperable difficulties in the way of its final demonstration. And there are as great men of Science as the above-named, who deny, most emphatically, the uncalled-for assumption, and loudly denounce the unwarrantable exaggerations on the question of this supposed similarity. It is sufficient to glance at the works of Broca, Gratiolet, Owen, Pruner-Bey, and finally at the last great work of de Quatrefages, Introduction à [pg 720]l'Étude des Races Humaines, Questions Générales, to discover the fallacy of the Evolutionists. We may say more: the exaggerations concerning this alleged similarity of structure between man and the anthropomorphous ape have become so glaring and absurd of late, that even Mr. Huxley has found himself forced to protest against the too sanguine expectations. It was that great Anatomist personally who called the “smaller fry” to order, by declaring in one of his articles that the differences between the structure of the human body and that of the highest anthropomorphous pithecoid, were not only far from being trifling and unimportant, but were, on the contrary, very great and suggestive:
Every bone of a gorilla bears marks by which it might be distinguished from the corresponding bone of a man.[1621]
Among the existing creatures there is not one single intermediate form that could fill the gap between man and the ape. To ignore that gap, he added, “would be no less wrong than absurd.”
Finally, the absurdity of such an unnatural descent of man is so palpable in the face of all the proofs and evidence as to the skull of the pithecoid compared to that of man, that de Quatrefages resorted unconsciously to our Esoteric theory by saying that it is rather the apes that can claim descent from man than vice versâ. As proven by Gratiolet, with regard to the cavities of the brain of the anthropoids—in which species that organ develops in an inverse ratio to what would be the case were the corresponding organs in man really the product of the development of the said organs in the apes—the size of the human skull and its brain, as well as the cavities, increase with the individual development of man. His intellect develops and increases with age, while his facial bones and jaws diminish and straighten, thus becoming more and more spiritualized; whereas with the ape it is the reverse. In its youth the anthropoid is far more intelligent and good-natured, while with age it becomes duller; and, as its skull recedes and seems to diminish as it grows, its facial bones and jaws develop, the brain being finally crushed, and thrown entirely back, to make with every day more [pg 721] room for the animal type. The organ of thought—the brain—recedes and diminishes, entirely conquered and replaced by that of the wild beast—the jaw apparatus.
Thus, as wittily remarked in the French work, a gorilla could with perfect justice address an Evolutionist, claiming its right of descent from him. It would say to him: We, anthropoid apes, form a retrogressive departure from the human type, and therefore our development and evolution are expressed by a transition from a human-like to an animal-like structure of organism; but in what way could you, men, descend from us—how can you form a continuation of our genus? For, to make this possible, your organization would have to differ still more than ours does from the human structure, it would have to approach still closer to that of the beast than ours does; and in such a case justice demands that you should give up to us your place in nature. You are lower than we are, once that you insist on tracing your genealogy from our kind; for the structure of our organization and its development are such that we are unable to generate forms of a higher organization than our own.
This is where the Occult Sciences agree entirely with de Quatrefages. Owing to the very type of his development man cannot descend from either an ape or an ancestor common to both apes and men, but shows his origin to be from a type far superior to himself. And this type is the “Heavenly Man”—the Dhyân Chohans, or the Pitris so-called, as shown in the first Part of this Volume. On the other hand, the pithecoids, the orang-outang, the gorilla, and the chimpanzee can, and, as the Occult Sciences teach, do, descend from the animalized Fourth human Root-Race, being the product of man and an extinct species of mammal—whose remote ancestors were themselves the product of Lemurian bestiality—which lived in the Miocene age. The ancestry of this semi-human monster is explained in the Stanzas as originating in the sin of the “mind-less” races of the middle Third Race period.