ied, with the clear
implication of "anything but an ape for an ancestor!"

I confess I have always found it hard to understand just why this
peculiar aversion should always be held against the unoffending ape
tribe. Why it would not be quite as satisfactory to find one's ancestor
in an ape as in the alternative lines of, for example, the cow, or the
hippopotamus, or the whale, or the dog has always been a mystery. Yet
the fact of this prejudice holds. Probably we dislike the ape because
of the very patency of his human affinities. The poor relation is
objectionable not so much because he is poor as because he is a
relation. So, perhaps, it is not the apeness, so to speak, of the ape
that is objectionable, but rather the human-ness. In any event, the
aversion has been matter of common notoriety ever since the Darwinian
theory became fully accepted; it showed itself now with renewed force
against poor _pithecanthropus_. A half-score of objections were launched
against him. It is needless to rehearse them now, since they were all
met valiantly, and the final verdict saw the new-comer triumphantly
ensconced in man's ancestral halls as the oldest sojourner there who
has any title to be spoken of as "human." He is only half human, to be
sure--a veritable ape-man, as his name implies--but exactly therein lies
his altogether unique distinction. He is the embodiment of that "missing
link" whose nonappearance had hitherto given so much comfort to the
sceptical.

Perhaps some crumbs of comfort may be found by the reactionists in the
fact that it is not held by Professor Haeckel, or by any other competent
authority, that the link which _pithecanthropus_ supplies welds man
directly with any existing man-ape--with gorilla, chimpanzee, or orang.
It is held that these highest existing apes are side branches, so
to say, of the ancestral tree, who developed, in their several ways,
contemporaneously with our direct ancestors, but are not themselves
directly of the royal line. The existing ape that has clung closest to
the direct ancestral type of our own race, it appears, is the gibbon--a
creature far less objectionable in that role because of the very paucity
of his human characteristics, as revealed to the casual observer.
Gibbon-like fossil apes are known, in strata representing a time some
millions of years antecedent to the epoch of _pithecanthropus_
even, which are held to be directly of the royal line through which
_pithecanthrop