Note 12 — Chapter I

Sundry other and still more special distinctions of a psychological kind have been alleged by various writers as obtaining between man and the lower animals—such as making fire, employing barter, wearing clothes, using tools, and so forth. But as all these distinctions are merely particular instances, or detailed illustrations, of the more intelligent order of ideation which belongs to mankind, it is needless to occupy space with their discussion. Here, also, I may remark that in this work I am not concerned with the popular objection to Darwinism on account of “missing-links,” or the absence of fossil remains structurally intermediate between those of man and the anthropoid apes. This is a subject that belongs to palæontology, and, therefore, its treatment would be out of place in these pages. Nevertheless, I may here briefly remark that the supposed difficulty is not one of any magnitude. Although to the popular mind it seems almost self-evident that if there ever existed a long series of generations connecting the bodily structure of man with that of the higher apes, at least some few of their bones ought now to be forthcoming; the geologist too well knows how little reliance can be placed on such merely negative testimony where the record of geology is in question. Countless other instances may now be quoted of connecting links having been but recently found between animal groups which are zoologically much more widely separated than are apes and men. Indeed, so destitute of force is this popular objection held to be by geologists, that it is not regarded by them as amounting to any objection at all. On the other hand, the close anatomical resemblance that subsists between man and the higher apes—every bone, muscle, nerve, vessel, etc., in the enormously complex structure of the one coinciding, each to each, with the no less enormously complex structure of the other—speaks so voluminously in favour of an uninterrupted continuity of descent, that, as before remarked, no one who is at all entitled to speak upon the subject has ventured to dispute this continuity so far as the corporeal structure is concerned. All the few naturalists who still withhold their assent from the theory of evolution in its reference to man, expressly base their opinion on those grounds of psychology which it is the object of the present treatise to investigate.