is fact can only be
duly appreciated by those who know the astounding complexity of our
bodily structure. Those who are ignorant of human anatomy cannot form
any adequate--probably not even an approximate--conception of its
intricacy. Yet we find that this terrifically intricate organisation is
repeated down to all the minute bones and muscles, blood-vessels, nerves
and viscera, in the bodies of the higher apes. Here, then, I say, we
have a fact--or rather let me say a hundred thousand facts--which cannot
possibly be attributed to chance. As reasonable beings we must conclude
that there has been some definite cause for this extraordinary imitation
by the most highly organised being in creation of the next most highly
organised. And if we reject the natural explanation of hereditary
descent from a common ancestry, we can only suppose that the Deity, in
creating man, took the most scrupulous pains to make him in the image of
the ape. This, I say, is a matter of undeniable fact--supposing the
creation theory true--and as a matter of fact, therefore, it calls for
explanation. Why should God have thus conditioned man as an elaborate
copy of the ape, when we know from the rest of creation how endless are
His resources in the invention of types?

I present the matter thus to show that even the weight of sentiment is
not all on the side of special creation. Look on this picture and on
this:--

The Creator has exhibited the extraordinary and unaccountable design of
casting the complex structure of man in the same mould that He had just
previously used to cast the complex structure of the ape.

"When I view all beings, not as special creations, but as the lineal
descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of
the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become
ennobled.... There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms
or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according
to the first law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms
most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved."

THE END.

LONDON: R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS.

* * * * *

NATURE SERIES.

POPULAR LECTURES AND ADDRESSES ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS IN PHYSICAL
SCIENCE. By Sir WILLIAM THOMSON, D.C.L., LL.D., F.R.S.E., Fellow of
St. Peter's College, Cambridge, a