relatives among living animals must undoubtedly
be the apes. Some little distance farther away stand the monkeys, and,
structurally speaking, there is more difference between a monkey and
an ape than there is between an ape and man. The gap between man and
his relatives of this group, known as the primates, is a mental, not a
physical one. While his brain and his mind have developed far beyond
theirs, the rest of his body is comparatively close to that of an ape.

Probably no one can face the possibility of his being descended from
creatures not unlike the ape, without feeling a stirring sense of
repugnance. The least aristocratic of us hesitates to name in the line
of his ancestry creatures so unlike himself as the members of this
group. It seems to us impossible that we should have descended from
creatures as lowly as they. If evolution is true, these are among our
near ancestors. Back of the group of primates lies a far less
developed set of insectivorous animals, behind them the reptiles,
behind them the fishes. When we get back this far we are less certain
but most probably the worms take up the story. So our ancestry runs
back to the very beginning, when it originated in the one-celled
animals which are also the ancestors of all the rest of the animal
world. If we are inclined to deny our ancestors in the trees, what
shall we say of our forefathers in the seas?

The question of course is not to be decided by our likes or our
dislikes. If the evolution of man is true it will not make it less
true because the process is not to our liking. It is our part, if this
be the truth, to accept it as we do any other truth. Surely those of
us who are moral of thought are not willing to disbelieve a truth
because it is unpleasant.

The newness of the idea is the chief reason for our dislike of it.
This lowliness of origin should not be distasteful to us. Nothing
about Abraham Lincoln seems to us more wonderful than that a man who
towered head and shoulders above his generation, indeed above most
generations of men, in his fineness of life, in his nobility of
purpose, in the integrity of his aims, should have been of
exceedingly humble extraction. It only adds to the glory of his later
achievements that he should have lived in a cabin, have spent his
young manhood splitting rails and running a flat-boat, and have gained
his education almost unaided from a few books and much meditation in
front of a log fire.

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