We are prone to speak of man’s emergence from the lower orders as if it were a simple thing, almost like the going from one country into another.  But try to think what it means; try to think of the slow transformation, of the long, toilsome road even from the halfway house of our simian ancestors.  If we do not give him the benefit of the sudden mutation theory of the origin of species, then think of the slow process, hair by hair, as it were, by which a tailed, apelike arboreal animal was transformed into a hairless, tailless, erect, tool-using, fire-using, speech-forming animal.  We see in our own day in the case of the African negro, that centuries of our Northern climate have hardly any appreciable effect toward making a white man of him; nor, on the other hand, has exposure to the tropical sun had much more effect in making a negro of the white man.  Probably it would take ten thousand years or more of these conditions to bleach the pigments out of the one skin and put them in the other.  There is convincing proof from painting and figures found in Egypt that neither the African negro nor the Egyptian has changed in features in five thousand years.

The most marvelous thing about man’s evolution is the inborn upward impulse in some one low organism that rested not till it reached its goal in him.  The mollusk remains, but some impulse went out from the mollusk that begat the fish.  The fish remains, but some impulse went out from the fish that begat the amphibian.  The amphibian remains, but some impulse went out from the amphibian that begat the reptile.  The reptile remains, but some impulse went out from the reptile that begat the mammal; and so on up to man.  Man must have had a specific line of descent.  One golden thread must connect him with the lowest forms of life.  And the wonder is that this golden thread was never snapped or lost through all the terrible vicissitudes of the geologic ages.  But I suppose it is just as great a wonder that the line of descent of the horse, or the sheep, or the dog, or the bird, was not snapped or lost.  Some impulse or tendency was latent or potential in the first unicellular life that rested not till it eventuated in each of these higher forms.  Did any terrestrial or celestial calamity endanger the line of descent of any of the higher creatures?  Was any form cut off in the world-wide crustal disturbances of the earth at the end of palaeozoic and mesozoic time, when so many forms of animal life appear to have been wiped out, that might in time have given birth to a kind unlike or superior to any now upon the earth?  Species after species have become extinct, whole orders and families have gone out, often rather suddenly.  Why we know not.  Why the line of man’s descent was not cut off, who knows?  It is a vain speculation.  There can be little doubt that in early Tertiary times our ancestor was a small, feeble mammal, maybe of the lemur, maybe of the marsupial kind, powerless before the great carnivorous mammals of that time,