Perhaps no order of mammals presents us with so extraordinary a series
of gradations as this--leading us insensibly from the crown and summit
of the animal creation down to creatures, from which there is but a
step, as it seems, to the lowest, smallest, and least intelligent of
the placental Mammalia. It is as if nature herself had foreseen the
arrogance of man, and with Roman severity had provided that his
intellect, by its very triumphs, should call into prominence the
slaves, admonishing the conqueror that he is but dust.
These are the chief facts, this the immediate conclusion from them to
which I adverted in the commencement of this Essay. The facts, I
believe, cannot be disputed; and if so, the conclusion appears to me to
be inevitable.
But if Man be separated by no greater structural barrier from the brutes
than they are from one another--then it seems to follow that if any
process of physical causation can be discovered by which the genera and
families of ordinary animals have been produced, that process of
causation is amply sufficient to account for the origin of Man. In
other words, if it could be shown that the Marmosets, for example, have
arisen by gradual modification of the ordinary Platyrhini, or that both
Marmosets and Platyrhini are modified ramifications of a primitive
stock--then, there would be no rational ground for doubting that man
might have originated, in the one case, by the gradual modification of
a man-like ape; or, in the other case, as a ramification of the same
primitive stock as those apes.
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