man does not
interpose, and so not likely to work much harm for the future. And if
natural selection, with artificial to help it, will produce better
animals and better men than the present, and fit them better to "the
conditions of existence," why, let it work, say we, to the top of its
bent. There is still room enough for improvement. Only let us hope
that it always works for good: if not, the divergent lines on
Darwin's diagram of transmutation made easy ominously show what small
deviations from the straight path may come to in the end.

The prospect of the future, accordingly, is on the whole pleasant and
encouraging. It is only the backward glance, the gaze up the long
vista of the past, that reveals anything alarming. Here the lines
converge as they recede into the geological ages, and point to
conclusions which, upon the theory, are inevitable, but by no means
welcome. The very first step backwards makes the Negro and the
Hottentot our blood-relations;--not that reason or Scripture objects
to that, though pride may. The next suggests a closer association of
our ancestors of the olden time with "our poor relations" of the
quadrumanous family than we like to acknowledge. Fortunately,
however,--even if we must account for him scientifically,--man with
his two feet stands upon a foundation of his own. Intermediate links
between the _Bimana_ and the _Quadrumana_ are lacking altogether; so
that, put the genealogy of the brutes upon what footing you will, the
four-handed races will not serve for our forerunners;--at least, not
until some monkey, live or fossil, is producible with great toes,
instead of thumbs, upon his nether extremities; or until some lucky
geologist turns up the bones of his ancestor and prototype in France
or England, who was so busy "napping the chuckie-stanes" and chipping
out flint knives and arrow-heads in the time of the drift, very many
ages ago,--before the British Channel existed, says Lyell[1],--and
until these men of the olden time are shown to have worn their
great-toes in a divergent and thumb-like fashion. That would be evidence
indeed: but until some testimony of the sort is produced, we must
needs believe in the separate and special creation of man, however it
may have been with the lower animals and with plants.

No doubt, the full development and symmetry of Darwin's hypothesis
strongly suggest the evolution of the human no less than the lower
animal races out of some simple primo