I confess I have always found it hard to understand just why this peculiar aversion should always be held against the unoffending ape tribe. Why it would not be quite as satisfactory to find one's ancestor in an ape as in the alternative lines of, for example, the cow, or the hippopotamus, or the whale, or the dog has always been a mystery. Yet the fact of this prejudice holds. Probably we dislike the ape because of the very patency of his human affinities. The poor relation is objectionable not so much because he is poor as because he is a relation. So, perhaps, it is not the apeness, so to speak, of the ape that is objectionable, but rather the human-ness. In any event, the aversion has been matter of common notoriety ever since the Darwinian theory became fully accepted; it showed itself now with renewed force against poor _pithecanthropus_. A half-score of objections were launched against him. It is needless to rehearse them now, since they were all met valiantly, and the final verdict saw the new-comer triumphantly ensconced in man's ancestral halls as the oldest sojourner there who has any title to be spoken of as "human." He is only half human, to be sure--a veritable ape-man, as his name implies--but exactly therein lies his altogether unique distinction. He is the embodiment of that "missing link" whose nonappearance had hitherto given so much comfort to the sceptical. Perhaps some crumbs of comfort may be found by the reactionists in the fact that it is not held by Professor Haeckel, or by any other competent authority, that the link which _pithecanthropus_ supplies welds man directly with any existing man-ape--with gorilla, chimpanzee, or orang. It is held that these highest existing apes are side branches, so to say, of the ancestral tree, who developed, in their several ways, contemporaneously with our direct ancestors, but are not themselves directly of the royal line. The existing ape that has clung closest to the direct ancestral type of our own race, it appears, is the gibbon--a creature far less objectionable in that rôle because of the very paucity of his human characteristics, as revealed to the casual observer. Gibbon-like fossil apes are known, in strata representing a time some millions of years antecedent to the epoch of _pithecanthropus_ even, which are held to be directly of the royal line through which _pithecanthropus_, and the hypothetical _Homo stupidus_, and the known _Homo neanderthalensis_, and, lastly, proud _Homo sapiens_ himself have descended. Thus Professor Haeckel is able to make the affirmation, as he did recently before the International Zoological Congress in Cambridge, that man's line of descent is now clearly traced, from a stage back in the Eocene time when our ancestor was not yet more than half arrived to the ape's estate, down to the time of true human development. "There no longer exists," he says, "a 'missing link.' The phyletic continuity