It is, therefore, established beyond question for all impartial scientific inquiry that the human race comes directly from the apes of the Old World; but, at the same time, I repeat that this is not so important in connection with the main question of the origin of man as is commonly supposed. Even if we entirely ignore it, all that we have learned from the zoological facts of comparative anatomy and ontogeny as to the placental character of man remains untouched. These prove beyond all doubt the common descent of man and all the rest of the mammals. Further, the main question is not in the least affected if it is said: "It is true that man is a mammal; but he has diverged at the very root of the class from all the other mammals, and has no closer relationship to any living group of mammals." The affinity is more or less close in any case, if we examine the relation of the mammal class to the sixty other classes of the animal world. Quite certainly the whole of the mammals, including man, have had a common origin; and it is equally certain that their common stem-forms were gradually evolved from a long series of lower Vertebrates. The resistance to the theory of a descent from the apes is clearly due in most men to feeling rather than to reason. They shrink from the notion of such an origin just because they see in the ape organism a caricature of man, a distorted and unattractive image of themselves, because it hurts man's aesthetic complacency and self-ennoblement. It is more flattering to think we have descended from some lofty and god-like being; and so, from the earliest times, human vanity has been pleased to believe in our origin from gods or demi-gods. The Church, with that sophistic reversal of ideas of which it is a master, has succeeded in representing this ridiculous piece of vanity as "Christian humility"; and the very men who reject with horror the notion of an animal origin, and count themselves "children of God," love to prate of their "humble sense of servitude." In most of the sermons that have poured out from pulpit and altar against the doctrine of evolution human vanity and conceit have been a conspicuous element; and, although we have inherited this very characteristic weakness from the apes, we must admit that we have developed it to a higher degree, which is entirely repudiated by sound and normal intelligence. We are greatly amused at all the childish follies that the ridiculous pride of ancestry has maintained from the Middle Ages to our own time; yet there is a large amount of this empty feeling in most men. Just as most people much prefer to trace their family back to some degenerate baron or some famous prince rather than to an unknown peasant, so most men would rather have as parent of the race a sinful and fallen Adam than an advancing, and vigorous ape. It is a matter of taste, and to that extent we cannot quarrel over these genealogical tendencies. Personally, the notion of ascent is more