What is the origin of man? Who are his ancestors? As soon as we ask the question there is no doubt whatever as to the answer, if we accept the principle of evolution. Our only means of judging relationship between animals is by the similarity of their structure. As soon as we come to examine the other creatures even in the most cursory fashion, there is only one group which in any close degree resembles the human species. Our nearest relatives among living animals must undoubtedly be the apes. Some little distance farther away stand the monkeys, and, structurally speaking, there is more difference between a monkey and an ape than there is between an ape and man. The gap between man and his relatives of this group, known as the primates, is a mental, not a physical one. While his brain and his mind have developed far beyond theirs, the rest of his body is comparatively close to that of an ape. Probably no one can face the possibility of his being descended from creatures not unlike the ape, without feeling a stirring sense of repugnance. The least aristocratic of us hesitates to name in the line of his ancestry creatures so unlike himself as the members of this group. It seems to us impossible that we should have descended from creatures as lowly as they. If evolution is true, these are among our near ancestors. Back of the group of primates lies a far less developed set of insectivorous animals, behind them the reptiles, behind them the fishes. When we get back this far we are less certain but most probably the worms take up the story. So our ancestry runs back to the very beginning, when it originated in the one-celled animals which are also the ancestors of all the rest of the animal world. If we are inclined to deny our ancestors in the trees, what shall we say of our forefathers in the seas? The question of course is not to be decided by our likes or our dislikes. If the evolution of man is true it will not make it less true because the process is not to our liking. It is our part, if this be the truth, to accept it as we do any other truth. Surely those of us who are moral of thought are not willing to disbelieve a truth because it is unpleasant. The newness of the idea is the chief reason for our dislike of it. This lowliness of origin should not be distasteful to us. Nothing about Abraham Lincoln seems to us more wonderful than that a man who towered head and shoulders above his generation, indeed above most generations of men, in his fineness of life, in his nobility of purpose, in the integrity of his aims, should have been of exceedingly humble extraction. It only adds to the glory of his later achievements that he should have lived in a cabin, have spent his young manhood splitting rails and running a flat-boat, and have gained his education almost unaided from a few books and much meditation in front of a log fire.