cases of reversion to a previous
simian stage, instead of being results of abnormal conditions in the
individual or variety. He sums up these arguments in the following
paragraph:

"If we take into account the rapidly accumulating data of European
naturalists concerning primitive man, with the mass of evidence
presented in these notes, we find an array of facts which irresistibly
point to a common origin with animals directly below us, and these
evidences are found in the massive skulls with coarse ridges for
muscular attachments, the rounding of the base of the nostrils, the
early ossification of the nasal bones, the small cranial capacity in
certain forms, the prominence of the frontal crest, the posterior
position of the _foramen magnum_, the approximation of the temporal
ridges, the lateral flattening of the tibia, the perforation of the
humerus, the tendency of the pelvis to depart from its usual
proportions; and, associated with all these, a rudeness of culture and
the evidence of the manifestation of the coarsest instincts. He must
be blind, indeed, who can not recognize the bearing of such grave and
suggestive modifications."

Yet Professor Morse knows that there is no true specific or even
generic kinship between man and any species of ape; that the phenomena
of idiocy and degeneracy have no real resemblance to those of distinct
specific types; that the resemblances of man to apes, such as they
are, point not in a direct manner to any stock of apes, but in a
desultory way to several; and consequently that, if derived from any
such animals, it must be from some stock altogether unknown to us as
yet, either among recent or fossil animals. Farther, as Cope, himself
an evolutionist, admits, while we can trace the skeletons of Eocene
mammals through several directions of specialization in succeeding
Tertiary times, man presents the phenomenon of an unspecialized
skeleton which can not fairly be connected with any of these lines.
Lastly, his quotation from Fiske, with reference to the supposed
effect of a protracted infancy to develop the moral characteristics of
man, though accompanied with the usual unfair and unreasonable sneer
(which a naturalist like Morse should have been ashamed to quote)
against men "still capable of believing that the human race was
created by miracle in a single day," is the feeblest possible attempt
to bridge over the gap between the spiritual nature of man and the
merely psychical natu