It appears to me, though it may seem somewhat bold to express this opinion of the views of a naturalist so deservedly eminent as Mr. Mivart, that in his interesting little treatise, “Man and Apes,”—a treatise which may be described as opposed to Darwin’s special views but not generally opposed to the theory of evolution,—he misapprehends Darwin’s position in this respect. For he arrives at the conclusion that if the Darwinian theory is sound, then “low down” (_i.e._, far remote) “in the scale of Primates” (tri-syllabic) “was an ancestral form so like man that it might well be called an _homunculus_; and we have the virtual pre-existence of man’s body supposed, in order to account for the actual first appearance of that body as we know it—a supposition manifestly absurd if put forward as an explanation.”[39] How, then, according to the Darwinian theory, is man related to the monkey? The answer to this question is simply that the relationship is the same in kind, though not the same in degree, as that by which the most perfect Caucasian race is related to the lowest race of Australian, or Papuan, or Bosjesman savages. No one supposes that one of these races of savages could by any process of evolution, however long-continued, be developed into a race resembling the Caucasian in bodily and mental attributes. Nor does any one suppose that the savage progenitor of the Caucasian races was identical with, or even closely resembled, any existing race of savages. Yet we recognize in the lowest forms of savage man our blood relations. In other words, it is generally believed that if our genealogy, and that of any existing race of savages, could be traced back through all its reticulations, we should at length reach a race whose blood we share with that race. It is also generally believed (though for my own part I think the logical consequences of the principle underlying all theories of evolution is in reality opposed to the belief) that, by tracing the genealogical reticulations still further back, we should at length arrive at a single race from which all the present races of man and no other animals have descended. The Darwinian faith with respect to men and monkeys is precisely analogous. It is believed that the genealogy of every existent race of monkeys, if traced back, would lead us to a race whose blood we share with that race of monkeys; and—which is at once a wider and a more precise proposition—that, as Darwin puts it, “the two main divisions of the Simiadæ, namely, the catarhine and platyrhine monkeys, with their sub-groups, have all proceeded from some one extremely ancient progenitor.” This proposition is manifestly wider. I call it also more precise, because it implies, and is evidently intended by Darwin to signify, that from that extremely ancient progenitor no race outside the two great orders of Simiadæ have even partially _descended_, though other races share with the Simiadæ descent from some still more remote race of progenitors.