hen his development has taken place in
a manner directly contrary to the acknowledged law of natural selection.
He has developed backwards; his frame is in every way weaker; he is
wanting in agility; he has lost the prehensile feet; he has lost teeth
fitted for fighting or crushing or tearing; he has but little sense of
smell; he has lost the hairy covering, and is obliged to help himself by
clothes.[1] If this loss was ornamental it is quite unlike any other
development in this respect, since no other creature has the same; for
ornamental purposes the fur becomes coloured, spotted, and striped, but
not lost. It is easy to reply that man being _intelligent_, his brain
power enables him to invent clothes, arms, implements, and so forth,
which not only supply all deficiencies of structure, but give him a
great superiority over all creatures. But how did he get that
intelligence? By what natural process of causation (without intelligent
direction) is it conceivable that, given a species of monkey, all at
once and at a certain stage, structural development should have been
retarded and actually reversed, and a development of brain structure
alone set in? Nor, be it observed, has any trace of _man_ with a
rudimentary brain ever been discovered. Savages have brains far in
excess of their requirements, and can consequently be educated and
improved. The skull of a prehistoric man found in the Neanderthal near
Dusseldorf is of average brain capacity, showing that in those remote
ages man was very much in capacity what he is at present.

[Footnote 1: It is remarkable that the loss of the hairy covering is
most complete when it is most wanted: the back, the spine, and the
shoulders are in nearly all races unprotected; and yet the want of a
covering from the heat or cold is such that the rudest savages have
invented some kind of cloak for the back.]

It must, however, be admitted that the special difficulties of the
origin of man are not purely structural. We do not know enough of the
Divine plan to be able to understand why it is that there is a certain
undeniable unity of form, in the two eyes, ears, mouth, limbs and organs
generally of the animal and man. Moreover, much is made of the fact, as
stated by a recent "Edinburgh Reviewer," that "the physical difference
between man and the lowest ape is trifling compared with that which
exists between the lowest ape and any brute animal that is not an
ape.[1]" This fact no doubt neg