So in the last instance, the ape and the lemur and all their derivatives may be, not records of some of the many stages through which man has passed in his process of evolution, sidetracked by the upward rush of one highly favoured or fortunate line, nor yet an abortive branch from the common trunk from which sprang both man and ape, but rather the last degradation of a primaeval energy, producing in its declension these strange caricatures of the Man in whose production it found its achievement. In other words, the old evolutionary idea is exactly reversed, and those phenomena once looked on as passed stages of growth, become the memorials of a creative process that has already achieved, and is now returning, with its fantastic manifestations in terms of declining life, even to that primordial mystery whence it had emerged. Granting this theory, the search for the "missing link," whether in the geological strata below those that revealed the Piltdown skull, or in the fastnesses of Central Asia, is as vain a quest as it has always been. Primaeval man, as he is grudgingly revealed to us, may have been the degenerate remainder of an earlier and fully developed race whose records are buried in the sunken fastnesses of some vanished Atlantis or Lemuria, as the races of the South Sea Islands may be less metamorphosed remnants of the same stock. Into this infinitely degraded residuum of a vanished race entered the new energizing force when the divine creative energy came once more into operation, in the fullness of time, and the Minoan, the Egyptian and the Greek came almost in an hour to their highest perfection. So through the unnumbered ages of the world's history, God has from time to time created man in His own image, out of the dust of the earth, and man so made "a little lower than the angels" has, also in time, fallen and forfeited his inheritance. Yet the process goes on without ceasing, and in conformity with some law of divine periodicity; but it is _Man_ that is created in the beginning, of his full stature, even as is symbolically recorded in the Book of Genesis; not a hairy quadrumana that by the operation of the laws of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, ultimately and through endless ages, and by the most infinitesimal changes, becomes at last Plato and Caesar, Leonardo and Dante, St. Louis and Shakespeare and St. Francis.