cal evolutionist as Alfred
Russell Wallace finds here a yawning gap in the line of descent, and is
inclined to look upon the intellect of man as a direct gift from the
realm of spirits. His explanation, it is true, is more difficult than
the problem itself. There are no facts to sustain it, and even if he
were not able to see how man's mind could be developed by natural
selection, it is a sort of _reductio ad absurdum_ to call in the angels
to bridge the chasm.

Romanes has dealt with the subject from a different and more scientific
point of view, and seems to have succeeded in showing that man's
intellect at its lowest level is not different in kind from the brute
intellect at its highest level. Controversy on this subject is too apt
to be based on the difference between the intellect of the brute and
that of enlightened man, in disregard of the great mental gap which
exists between the latter and the thought powers of the lowest savage.
In the preceding section an effort was made to show how crude and
imperfect must have been the language of primitive man. Its imperfection
was a fair gauge of that of his powers of thought. His intellect stood
at a very low level, seemingly no further above that of the highest apes
than it was below that of enlightened man.

In fact, enormous as is the interval between the mind of the brute and
that of the man of modern civilization, the whole long line of mental
development can be traced, with the exception of a comparatively small
interval. This is the gap between the intellect of the anthropoid ape
and that of primitive man, the one important last chapter in the story
of mental evolution. Supernaturalism, driven from its strongholds of the
past, has taken its last stand upon this broken link, claiming that here
the line of descent fails, and that the gap could not have been filled
without a direct inflow of intellect from the world of spirits or an
immediate act of creation from the Deity.

This view of the case is not likely to be accepted as final. Science has
bridged so many gaps in the kingdom of nature that it is not likely to
retire baffled from this one, but will continue its investigations in
place of accepting conclusions that have not the standing even of
hypothesis, since they are unsupported by a single known fact. At first
sight, indeed, the facts which bear upon this question seem stubborn
things to explain by the evolution theory. The gap in intellect between
the h