The Missing Link is the great desideratum of Evolution, for the evolutionist indignantly disclaims the present apes or monkey as ancestors. He tells us the connecting link was a creature superior to these. But of which he is unable to show any specimen. It is purely mythical. We have the remains of millions of animals reaching through all the ages and why is this particular specimen wanting? Dr. Rudolph Virchow, the great discoverer of the germ theory, has for thirty years, according to Haeckel, "opposed the theory of man's descent from the brute." (_Last Link_, p. 27.) He himself says: "The intermediate form is unimaginable save in a dream.... We cannot teach or consent that it is an achievement that man has descended from the ape or other animal." (_Homiletic Review_, January, 1901.) Dr. Friedrich Pfaff, professor of natural sciences in the University of Erlangen, writes on the question as follows: "Nowhere in the older deposits is an ape that approximates more closely to man, or man that approximates more closely to an ape, or perhaps a man at all. The same gulf which is found to-day between man and the ape goes back with undiminished breadth and depth to the tertiary period. This fact alone is sufficient to make its unintelligibleness clear to every one who is not penetrated by the conviction of the infallibility of the theory of the gradual transmutation of and progressive development of all organized creatures. If, however, we now find one of the most man-like apes (gibbon) in the tertiary period, and this species is still in the same low grade, and side by side with it, at the end of the ice period, man is found in the same high grade as to-day, the ape not having approximated more nearly to man, and modern man not having become further removed from the ape than the first man, every one who is in a position to draw a right conclusion can infer, that the facts contradict a theory of constant progression, development and ceaselessly increasing variation from generation to generation, as surely as it is possible to do." (_Age and Origin of Man_, Am. Tr. Soc., p. 52.) From time to time the discovery of the "missing link" is announced and telegraphed through the civilized world, only to be remanded to its place among the remains of brutes or men. We will consider the instances of such as they have been presented: 1. The Calaveras Skull now in the California State Museum. This has been shown recently to be a hoax. It was placed in a mine shaft 150 feet deep, by Mr. R. C. Scribner, a storekeeper at the mine, as a practical joke. This he lately acknowledged to the Rev. W. H. Dyer, of Los Angeles, a clergyman of the Episcopal church.