If ours be not the latest stage of being, but is to be succeeded by “new heavens and a new earth,” marvellous indeed are the revelations which posthistoric strata have yet to disclose. But even they will scarcely suffice to reveal the most striking characteristics of a being on whom the economy of nature reacts in a way it never did on living being before; in whom all external influences are subordinated to an inner world of thought, by means of which he is capable of searching into the past, anticipating the future, of looking inward, and being a law unto himself. His nature embraces possibilities of the widest conceivable diversity, for his is no longer the law of instinct, but of reason: law, therefore, that brings with it conscious liberty, and also conscious responsibility. But an important and seemingly conflicting element arises out of the capacity of man for moral progression, to which some ethnologists fail to give due weight. A suggestive thought of Agassiz, relative to certain real or supposed analogies between the geographical distribution of species of simiæ, and especially the anthropoid apes, and certain inferior types of man, sufficed as the nucleus of Gliddon’s elaborate monkey-chart, in the _Indigenous Races of the Earth_, illustrative of the geographical distribution of monkeys in relation to that of certain types of men. Notwithstanding the very monkeyfying process to which some of the illustrations of inferior human types have been subjected in this pictorial chorography, the correspondences are not such as to carry conviction to most minds. But, assuming, as a supposed _reductio ad absurdum_, the descent of all the diverse species of monkeys from a single pair, Mr. Gliddon thus sums up his final observations: “I propose, therefore, that a male and female pair of the ‘species’ _Cynocephalus Hamadryas_, be henceforward recognised as the anthropoid analogues of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japhet; and that it must be from these two individuals that, owing to transplantation, together with the combined action of aliment and climate, the fifty-four monkeys represented on our chart have originated. It is, notwithstanding, sufficiently strange, that, under such circumstances, this ‘primordial organic type’ of monkey should have so highly improved in Guinea, and in Malayana, as to become _gorillas_ and _chimpanzees_, _orangs_ and _gibbons_; whereas on the contrary, the descendants of ‘Adam and Eve’ have, in the same localities, actually deteriorated into the most degraded and abject forms of humanity.” In reality, however, whatever may be said about the possibility of such simian development, possible human deterioration is an inevitable attribute of the rational, moral free-agent man: capable of the noblest aspirations and of wondrous intellectual advancement, but also with a capacity for moral degradation such as belongs to him alone. The one characteristic, no less than the