No scientist has ever been so foolish as to say that man and the apes belong to the same species. There are four species of the higher apes and one of man, though the one species of man is divided into five varieties, called “races.” Varieties differ less widely than species. Individuals within a variety also differ. Differences are no bar to unity if they are nullified and outweighed by similarities. Finally, let us keep in mind that while man has departed from the ancestral type, developing in one direction, the apes have gone off in another and have acquired characteristics peculiarly their own. Resemblance in a babe and a young ape is far greater than in a man and an adult ape. The same is true of the young of all allied species. This divergence from birth of the adults of different species is strong evidence of a common origin. These are only a few of the hundreds of evidences proving that man fits into the same creative scheme with the lower animals--proving that he, in common with them, has developed from still lower forms, and that, as a product of the creative forces of Nature, he is wholly subject to her laws. CONNECTING LINKS There is a greater unity of all life than the many divisions and sub-divisions of the analyst would seem to warrant. The dividing lines between the different classes, orders, families and species are more apparent than real, the barriers of separation not so impassable as appear at first sight. To begin at the bottom, there is no hard and fast line drawn between living and non-living matter--or at least it is not always easy to say where the line should be drawn. Tyndall says, “The tendency of modern science is to break down the wall of partition between the organic and the inorganic, and to reduce both to the operation of forces which are the same in kind, but which are differently compounded.” Passing on to the first grand division of life, it would seem that nothing could be plainer than the line of cleavage between vegetable and animal life. Yet there is a twilight zone between the two where each shades off toward the other, and which is inhabited by several living species of so doubtful a nature that scientists cannot agree as to which of the two great kingdoms they belong. These doubtful organisms are claimed by both the botanist and the geologist and are described in the textbooks of both. Really they do not belong to either division, but are simply organisms that have not risen in the scale of life to the diverging point of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Ascending the animal scale we come to the line separating the invertebrates from the vertebrates. Here, on the invertebrate side are species that have the beginnings of a backbone--an elastic smooth cord--and gill-slits, thus proving their relationship with the fishes, the lowest of the vertebrates.