ANTHROPOIDEA i7

treme unwisdom of arguing on the undiscovered, and
putting our trust in boundary lines.

The one central fact is the unity of creation.
The division into species-is merely a grouping of
individuals, no two of which are exactly alike, made
by man himself for his convenience in study and
treatment. He groups individuals into varieties,
varieties into species, species into genera, genera into
families, families into orders, orders into classes, and
at every stage is at the mercy of some fresh discovery,
if he has been presumptuous enough to act upon the
unknown. It is for this reason that natural-history
books go out of date, for no classification is on a
sound basis which is dependent on the assumed
absence of certain features or forms.

ANTHROPOIDEA.—From a man’s point of
view the animais highest in the scale of life are those
most like himself. He has a backbone, and con-
sequently he considers animals with a backbone to

_ be in a higher stage of development than those with-

q

out one. He is mammalian, and therefore puts the
mammals at the head of the vertebrate series, with
the birds on his flank, and the reptiles, amphibians,
and fishes following after. And in this arrangement
he is confirmed by the records of the rocks, which
have yielded so many intermediate forms, and which—
with their crowd of mammaliain their more recent beds,
the first appearance of reptiles at an earlier age, of
amphibians at a still earlier, of fishes at a still earlier,
and the persistence of invertebrates throughout, with
the obvious evidence of a gradual advance from the
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