Old writers before the days of Darwin had talked and written about the "missing link," though I cannot say who first used the term in reference to a creature intermediate between man and apes. Sir Charles Lyell in 1851 made use of the term in regard to extinct animals which were intermediate in structure between two existing types. A learned and able writer--the Scotch judge, Lord Monboddo--in the later half of the eighteenth century put forward a theory of the development of mankind from apes such as the orang, quite independently of any general theory of "transformism" or of the progressive development of the animal and vegetable worlds, from simple beginnings. Lord Monboddo, in the absence of any knowledge of a "missing link," or of animals intermediate between man and the highest living apes, made reasonable speculations (based on wide study of anthropology and ancient philosophy) as to the passage from the monkey to man. He regarded man as of the same "species" as the orang-utan. He traced the gradual elevation of man to the social state as a natural process determined by "the necessities of human life." He looked on language (which he said is not "natural" to man in the sense of being necessary to his self-preservation) as a consequence of his social state. His views about the origin of society and language, and the faculties by which man is distinguished from the brutes, are in some interesting ways similar to those of Darwin. He conceived man as gradually elevating himself from an animal condition in which his mind is immersed in matter to a state in which mind acts independent of body. He was ridiculed and declared to be half mad by his co-temporaries (among them Samuel Johnson), although he was, philosophically, far in advance of those with whom he came into contact. Darwin's views on the "Descent of Man" were met in the same contemptuous spirit at first. But he held a much stronger position than Monboddo, having first of all established the general theory of organic evolution, and having, further, a well-established mass of evidence at his command in regard to the relationship of man and apes. Further, he had that wonderful champion, Huxley, to fight for him. Huxley's book, "Man's Place in Nature," originally given as lectures which I, then a boy, attended, placed the evidence of the close relationship of man and the higher apes in the clearest way before the public, and, indeed, established the identity of the structure of man with that of the ape, bone for bone, muscle for muscle, and nerve for nerve.