That is a question of profoundest interest. But if the authoritative and final demonstration were given either way to-morrow, we, in ourselves, should remain unaltered. We should be conscious of no uplifting and of no fall. Immediate or mediate creation, if God be the author, must be alike Divine. To fear the consequences of honest truth seeking research on this momentous question, is to manifest little love of truth for its own sake, on the one hand; and little stalwartness of personal conviction, as to the security of the foundation of professed beliefs, on the other. Whether we will or not, the whole matter will be searched to its deepest depths. But amidst all the conflict of opinion as to details, in one thing all are agreed, and that is, that the gulf between man and the noblest apes is such as to be practically without comparison. Whatever science may be able to show ultimately as to the relation of man to the anthropoid apes, there is to-day no biologically demonstrated and direct kinship. That the anthropoid apes, as we know them, were in any proper sense the _direct_ ancestors of man, is not a serious contention of even extreme evolutionists. The facts before us do not justify it. The highest ape is still an ape; and whilst the oldest human remains, such as the Eugis and Neanderthal skulls, discovered in association with evidences of immense antiquity, have remarkable characteristics, pointing in some respects in the direction of the great apes, they are still the crania of men. After a critical and exhaustive examination of the two skulls above referred to, Professor Huxley says concerning the Eugis skull: ‘Its measurements agree equally well with those of some European skulls. And assuredly there is no mark of degradation about any part of its structure. It is, in fact, a fair average human skull, which might have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brains of a savage.’[35] And in summing up the results of an equally critical examination of the far more remarkable Neanderthal skull, the same unquestionable authority says: ‘In no sense, then, can the Neanderthal bones be regarded as the remains of a human being intermediate between men and apes. At most they demonstrate the existence of a _man_ whose skull may be said to revert somewhat towards the pithecoid type.... And indeed, though truly the most pithecoid of known human skulls, the Neanderthal cranium is by no means so isolated as it appears to be at first, but forms in reality the extreme term of a series leading gradually from it to the highest and best developed of human crania.’[36] Nothing has arisen to seriously modify these authoritative statements. No thorough anatomist practically familiar with the structure of the anthropoids on the one side, and man on the other, could attempt to argue that man can be directly a descendant of chimpanzee, gorilla, or orang. ‘I may say,’ says Huxley, ‘that the