The case corresponding, then, to that of the purest of all human races, and the case therefore most favourable to the view presented by Darwin (though very far from essential to the Darwinian theory), is simply this, that, in the first place, many animals regarded as truly Simiadæ share descent from animals outside that family which Darwin regards as the ape progenitor of man; and, in the second place, many animals regarded as outside the Simiadæ share descent from that ape-like progenitor. This involves the important inference that the ape-like progenitor of man was not so markedly differentiated from other families of animals then existing, that fertile intercourse was impossible. A little consideration will show that this inference accords well with, if it might not almost have been directly deduced from, the Darwinian doctrine that all orders of mammals were, in turn, descended from a still more remote progenitor race. The same considerations may manifestly be applied also to that more remote race, to the still more remote race from which all the vertebrates have descended, and so on to the source itself from which all forms of living creatures are supposed to have descended. A difficulty meets us at that remotest end of the chain analogous to the difficulty of understanding how life began at all; but we should profit little by extending the inquiry to these difficulties, which remain, and are likely long to remain, insuperable. So far, however, are the considerations above urged from introducing any new or insuperable objection to the Darwinian theory, that, rightly understood, they indicate the true answer to an objection which has been urged by Mivart and others against the belief that man has descended from some ape-like progenitor. Mivart shows that no existing ape or monkey approaches man more nearly in all respects than other races, but that one resembles man more closely in some respects, another in others, a third in yet others, and so forth. “The ear lobule of the gorilla makes him our cousin,” he says, “but his tongue is eloquent in his own dispraise.” If the “bridging convolutions of the orang[’s brain] go to sustain his claim to supremacy, they also go far to sustain a similar claim on the part of the long-tailed thumbless spider-monkeys. If the obliquely ridged teeth of _Simia_ and _Troglodytes_ (the chimpanzee) point to community of origin, how can we deny a similar community of origin, as thus estimated, to the howling monkeys and galagos? The liver of the gibbons proclaims them almost human; that of the gorilla declares him comparatively brutal. The lower American apes meet us with what seems the ‘front of Jove himself,’ compared with the gigantic but low-browed denizens of tropical Western Africa.”