s not we may here notice briefly.

Evolution is not a theory that "man is a developed monkey." The question
of the immediate origin of man is not the central or overshadowing
question of evolution. This question offers no special difficulties in
theory, although the materials for exact knowledge are in many
directions incomplete. Homologies more perfect than those connecting man
with the great group of monkeys could not exist. These imply the
blood-relationship of the human race with the great host of apes and
monkeys. As to this there can be no shadow of a doubt. And as similar
homologies connect man with all members of the group of mammals, similar
blood-relationship must exist. And homologies, less close but equally
unmistakable, connect all backboned animals one with another; and the
lowest backboned types are closely joined to worm-like forms not usually
classed as vertebrates.

It is perfectly true that, with the higher or anthropoid apes, the
relations with man are extremely intimate. But man is not simply "a
developed ape." Apes and men have diverged from the same primitive
stock, apelike, manlike, but not exactly the one or the other. No apes
or monkeys now extant could apparently have been ancestors of primitive
man. None can ever "develop" into man. As man changes and diverges, race
from race, so do they. The influence of effort, the influence of
surroundings, the influence of the sifting process of natural selection,
acts upon them as it acts upon man.

The process of evolution is not progress, but better adaptation to
conditions of life. As man becomes fitted for social and civic life, so
does the ape become fitted for life in the tree-tops. The movement of
monkeys is towards "simianity," not humanity. The movement of cat-life
is towards felinity, that of the dog-races towards caninity. Each step
in evolution upward or downward, whatever it may be, carries each
species or type farther from the primitive stock. These steps are never
retraced. For an ape to become a man he must go back to the simple
characters of the simple common type from which both have sprung. These
characters are shown in the ape-baby and in the human embryo in its
corresponding stages. For ancestral traits lost in the adult are
preserved in the young. This comes through the operation of the great
force of race-memory, we call heredity.

Evidence of biology points to the descent of all mammals, of all
vertebrates, of all animals, of