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In like manner, the brain of a human foetus, at the fifth month, may correctly be said to be, not only the brain of an ape, but that of an Arctopithecine or marmoset-like ape; for its hemispheres, with their great posterior lobster, and with no sulci but the sylvian and the calcarine, present the characteristics found only in the group of the Arctopithecine Primates.
Even the earliest Primates show large brains in comparison with the small brains of their contemporaries. It is a familiar fact in the animal world that when a certain group enters upon a particular path of evolution, some members of the group advance only a little way along it, some go farther, and some outstrip all the others. The development of social life among the bees will illustrate this.
Of course, if man is descended from an ancient ape-like form, and from the Primates and their brute progeny, he must have been as uncivilized and brutish as any baboon or gorilla today, or the apes, which, last year, horribly mangled the children at Sierra Leone. He must have worked his way up into civilization.
And, as I believe, it is in this simple but not quite obvious way, that the process of progress and of degradation may generally be seen to run. All theories as to the primitive man must be very uncertain. Granting the doctrine of evolution to be true, man must be held to have a common ancestor with the rest of the Primates. But then we do not know what their common ancestor was like.
Where are the descendants of these mongrel breeds, part monkey and part man? We would expect all gradations of mixed animals from monkey to man. "Two or three millions of years ago an enormous family of monkeys spread over Europe, Asia and Africa." All related, many our ancestors. Why did not some other species of the primates equal or excel man or advance part way between man and the brute?
What I attempt is simply to mark in incident after incident which has occurred within its walls the relation of the House to the Primates whom it has sheltered for seven hundred years, and through them to the literary, the ecclesiastical, the political history of the realm. Nothing illustrates the last of these relations better than the site of the house itself.
The Revolution which flung him aside had completed the work of the great Rebellion in sweeping away for ever the old pretensions of the primates to an autocracy within the Church of England. But it seemed to have opened a nobler prospect in placing them at the head of the Protestant Churches of the world.
Occasionally in recent years students of human diseases have employed monkeys or apes for experimental tests, but aside from the isolated results thus obtained, extremely little is known concerning the diseases peculiar to the various types of infra-human primates or the significant relations of their diseases to those of man.
In attempting to rescue us from the ape as our ancestor, they have shown that we are descendants of the whole monkey family and every species of ape and of many of their more disreputable relatives also. Great is evolution! It certainly would be impossible for one single pair to have become the ancestors of the human race, without mixing and interbreeding with their kindred primates.
At length they presented a petition to Reschid Pasha, Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs. This petition was treated with respect; but, owing to the influence of some of the Armenian Primates, it procured no relief. Subsequently they carried their case before the English, Prussian, and American Ministers, asking their intervention.
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