The existing species of anthropoid apes, the orang, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla, do not differ more widely from one another than do many of the extreme types of the human species. In colour, hair, volume of brain, form of skull, stature, and a hundred other peculiarities, the Negro and the European stand further apart than those anthropoids do from one another, and no naturalist from Mars or Saturn, investigating the human family for the first time, and free from prepossession, would hesitate to class the white, black, yellow, red, and perhaps five or six other varieties, as different species. In the case of these anthropoid apes no one supposes that they were miraculously created in recent times. On the contrary, we find their type already fully developed in the Miocene, and we infer, that like the horse, camel, and so many other existing mammals, their origin may be traced step by step backwards to some lower and generalized type in the Eocene. Who can doubt that physical man, an animal constructed almost exactly on the same anatomical ground-plan as the anthropoids, came into existence by a similar process? The only answer would be, if it could be proved, that his existence on earth had been so short as to make it impossible that so many and so great specific variations as now exist, and some of which have been proved to have existed early in the Quaternary period, could have been developed by natural means and by the slow processes of evolution. But this is just where the evidence fails, and is breaking down more and more every year and with every fresh discovery. Recent man has given place to Quaternary man; post-glacial to inter-glacial and pre-glacial; and now the evidence for the existence of man or of some ancestral form of man, in the Tertiary period, has accumulated to such an extent that there are few competent anthropologists who any longer deny it. But with this extension of time the existence of man, instead of being an anomaly and a discord, falls in with the sublime harmony of the universe, of which it is the dominant note. THE END. _Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London & Bungay._ Transcriber's note: The spelling of words in languages other than English, have been left as they appear in the book. Minor spelling inconsistencies, mainly hyphenated words, have been harmonized. Obvious typos have been corrected. An "Illustration" section has been added as an aid to the reader. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Human Origins, by Samuel Laing