Professor Hartmann observes that Huxley’s statement, that the lowest apes are further removed from the highest apes than the latter are from men, is, according to his experience, still perfectly valid. ‘It cannot be denied that the highest order of the animal world is closely connected with the highest created being.’ But it does not follow therefrom that man is descended from apes, or is simply an improved kind of ape. There is, we fear, still prevailing among large sections of intelligent persons the belief that Darwin’s theory was intended to prove that the monkey was the progenitor of man. Of course no one who reads Darwin’s works for himself would ever go away with such a misconception of the whole question. What Darwin’s hypothesis suggested was, not that man was descended from the monkey, but that both man and the monkey may be descendants of a common progenitor, a common type, now extinct, and of which no indisputable traces have yet been found. From this common type, or ground-form, so to speak, the process of development may, according to Darwin, have resulted in two distinct branches or offshoots—the one branch of development ending in the monkey tribe, the other branch ending in man. It is, in the absence of any certain traces of the extinct common type or progenitor, not a subject on which to dogmatise, but is a theory or hypothesis which, in the opinion of Darwin and many other scientists after him, best accounts for the morphological development of man viewed merely from the physical side. Professor Hartmann admits that his investigations have not brought the problem any nearer to a solution. A baby gorilla is much nearer in physical constitution to a human baby, than the full-grown gorilla is to the mature man; thus indicating that the process of development within the lifetime of an Anthropoid is not in the direction of improvement or further approximation to the human type, but is in the direction of retrogression, or further removal from the human type. ‘A great chasm,’ he says, ‘between Man and Anthropoids is constituted, as I believe, by the fact that the human race is capable of education, and is able to acquire the highest mental culture, while the most intelligent Anthropoid can only receive a certain mechanical training. And even to this training a limit is set by the surly temper displayed by Anthropoids as they get older.’ So that it would seem as if the development of the Anthropoids morally, if we may so use the word here, is, like their physical development, not one of progress or improvement _in the individual_. These larger apes, therefore, with all their striking resemblances to the human form, are not moving nearer towards Man, but merely remain Man-like. SPIRITED AWAY. IN THREE CHAPTERS.—CHAP. I.