eriod. The speechless
primaeval men (alali), then, is the connecting link between the man-like
apes and man. The fore-hand of the anthropoides became the human hand,
their hinder-hand a foot for walking. They did not possess the
articulate human language of words and the higher developments, as
consciousness and the formation of ideas must have been very imperfect.

Out of the pithecanthropi men developed genuine man, by the development
of the animal language of sounds into a connected or articulate language
of words--the brain also developed higher and higher. This transition
took place, probably, at the beginning of the quaternary period, or
possibly in the tertiary.

We have now very briefly reviewed the principal outlines of the
ancestors of man, showing that man has developed from the little mass of
protoplasm, as have all animals and plants. He therefore was not
_spontaneously_ created, but was developed. The question is often asked
by simple-minded people, with much delight, Why do we not behold the
interesting spectacle of the transformation of a chimpanzee into a man,
or conversely of a man by retrogression into an orang?--it only shows
that they are not acquainted with the first principles of the Doctrine
of Descent. "Not one of the apes," says Schmidt, "can revert to the
state of his primordial ancestors, except by retrogression--by which a
primordial condition is by no means attained--he cannot divest himself
of his acquired characters fixed by heredity, nor can he exceed himself
and become man; for man does not stand in the direct line of development
from the ape. The development of the anthropoid apes has taken a lateral
course from the nearest human progenitors, and man can as little be
transformed into a gorilla as a squirrel can be changed into a rat."

[Illustration: FIG. I.--Salamandra Maculata.--_Haeckel_. The Water Newts
and Salamanders were the next higher stage after the Proteus and the
Axolotl.]

[Illustration: FIG. I.--Represents Primaeval Amniota (Protamnia). Lizard
(Lacerta), after _Orton_.]

[Illustration: FIG. II.--Represents Primary Mammals (Promammalia).
AMNIOTA SERIES. Duck-billed Platypus (Ornithorhynchus
paradoxus).--_Haeckel_.]

"Feeling evidently,"[17] says Haeckel, "rather than understanding,
induces most people to combat the theory of their 'descent from apes.'
It is simply because the organism of the ape appears a caricature of
man, a distorted likeness of ourselves in a