This view of the case is not likely to be accepted as final. Science has bridged so many gaps in the kingdom of nature that it is not likely to retire baffled from this one, but will continue its investigations in place of accepting conclusions that have not the standing even of hypothesis, since they are unsupported by a single known fact. At first sight, indeed, the facts which bear upon this question seem stubborn things to explain by the evolution theory. The gap in intellect between the highest apes and the lowest man is a considerable one, which no existing ape seems likely ever to cross. However the anthropoid apes gained their degree of mental ability, it does not appear to be on the increase. They are in a state of mental stagnation and may have remained so for millions of years. Something similar, indeed, can be said of the lowest savages. They also are mentally stagnant. The indications are that for thousands, or tens of thousands, of years in the past their intellectual progress has been almost nothing. Yet it is beyond reasonable question that the advanced thinker of to-day has evolved from an ancestor as low in the mental scale as this savage, probably much lower; and this renders it very conceivable that a similar process of evolution covered the interval between the ape intellect and that of primitive man. Somewhere, at some time in the far past, the mental stagnation of man was broken, and the development of the mind began its long progression toward enlightenment. This was not in the localities in which the lower savages are now found, the equatorial forests of Africa and South America and other realms of savage life, the change in all probability taking place elsewhere, under new and severe exigencies of life. Similarly we have much justification in saying that somewhere, at some time, the mental stagnation of the ape was broken, and the long development of the mind from ape to man began. This did not take place in the instances of the existing anthropoids, and, as in the analogous case of civilized man, its influencing cause must be looked for in exigencies of existence acting upon some form different in character and habitat from these apes.