He concludes that the existence of these wide-spread signs of affinity and the associated signs of divergence, disprove the theory that the structural characters existing in the human frame have had their origin in the influence of inheritance and “natural selection.” “In the words of the illustrious Dutch naturalists, Messrs. Schroeder, Van der Kolk and Vrolik,” he says, “the lines of affinity existing between different Primates construct rather a network than a ladder. It is indeed a tangled web, the meshes of which no naturalist has as yet unravelled by the aid of natural selection. Nay, more, these complex affinities form such a net for the use of the teleological _retiarius_ as it will be difficult for his Lucretian antagonist to evade, even with the countless turns and doublings of Darwinian evolutions.” It appears to me that when we observe the analogy between the relationships of individuals, families, and races of man, and the relationships of the various species of animals, the difficulty indicated by Mr. Mivart disappears. Take, for instance, the case of the eight allied families above considered. Suppose, instead of the continual intermarriages before imagined—an exceptional order of events, be it remembered—that the more usual order of things prevails, viz., that alliances take place with other families. For simplicity, however, imagine that each married pair has two children, male and female, and that each person marries once and only once. Then it will be found that the pair A have ten families of cousins, two first-cousin families, and eight second-cousin families; these are all the families which share descent from the eight great-grandparents of the pair. (To have third-cousin families we should have to go back to the fourth generation.) Thus there are eleven families in all. Now, in the case first imagined of constant intermarrying, there would still have been eleven families, but they would all have descended from eight great-grandparents, and we should then expect to find among the eleven families various combinations, so to speak, of the special characteristics of the eight families from which they had descended. On the other hand, eleven families, in _no_ way connected, have descended from eighty-eight great-grandparents, and would present a corresponding variety of characteristics. But in the case actually supposed, in which the eleven families are so related that each one (for what applies to the pair A applies to the others) has two first-cousin families, and eight second-cousin families, it will be found that instead of 88 they have only 56 great-grandparents, or ancestors, in the third generation above them. The two families related as first cousins to the pair A have, like these, eight great-grandparents, four out of these eight for one family, being the four grandparents of the father of the pair A, the other four being outsiders; while four of the eight great-grandparents of the other