ighest apes and the lowest man is a considerable one, which no
existing ape seems likely ever to cross. However the anthropoid apes
gained their degree of mental ability, it does not appear to be on the
increase. They are in a state of mental stagnation and may have remained
so for millions of years. Something similar, indeed, can be said of the
lowest savages. They also are mentally stagnant. The indications are
that for thousands, or tens of thousands, of years in the past their
intellectual progress has been almost nothing. Yet it is beyond
reasonable question that the advanced thinker of to-day has evolved from
an ancestor as low in the mental scale as this savage, probably much
lower; and this renders it very conceivable that a similar process of
evolution covered the interval between the ape intellect and that of
primitive man.

Somewhere, at some time in the far past, the mental stagnation of man
was broken, and the development of the mind began its long progression
toward enlightenment. This was not in the localities in which the lower
savages are now found, the equatorial forests of Africa and South
America and other realms of savage life, the change in all probability
taking place elsewhere, under new and severe exigencies of life.
Similarly we have much justification in saying that somewhere, at some
time, the mental stagnation of the ape was broken, and the long
development of the mind from ape to man began. This did not take place
in the instances of the existing anthropoids, and, as in the analogous
case of civilized man, its influencing cause must be looked for in
exigencies of existence acting upon some form different in character and
habitat from these apes.

The existing anthropoid apes may justly be compared in condition with
the existing low savages. In both cases a satisfactory adaptation to
their situation has been gained. These apes are still arboreal and
frugivorous, as their remote ancestors were. They have for ages been in
a state of close adaptation to their life conditions, and the influences
of development have been largely wanting. Such evolution as took place
must have been extremely slow. In like manner the lowest savages live in
intimate relations with the conditions surrounding them. All problems of
food-getting, habitation, climate, etc., have long since been solved,
and in the tropical forests in which so many of them dwell they are in
thorough accord with the situation. Mentally, th