technical interest, and the
authorities are not agreed in replying to it. We saw that, on the
blood-test, man showed a very close relationship to the anthropoid apes,
a less close affinity to the Old World monkeys, a more remote affinity
to the American monkeys, and a very faint and distant affinity to the
femurs. A comparison of their structures suggests the same conclusion.
It is, therefore, generally believed that the anthropoid apes and man
had a common ancestor in the early Miocene or Oligocene, that this group
was closely related to the ancestral group of the Old World monkeys, and
that all originally sprang from a primitive and generalised femur-group.
In other words, a branch of the earliest femur-like forms diverges,
before the specific femur-characters are fixed, in the direction of the
monkey; in this still vague and patriarchal group a branch diverges,
before the monkey-features are fixed, in the direction of the
anthropoids; and this group in turn spreads into a number of types, some
of which are the extinct apes of the Miocene, four become the gorilla,
chimpanzee, orang, and gibbon of to-day, and one is the group that will
become man. To put it still more precisely, if we found a whole series
of remains of man's ancestors during the Tertiary, we should probably
class them, broadly, as femur-remains in the Eocene, monkey-remains in
the Oligocene, and ape-remains in the Miocene. In that sense only man
"descends from a monkey."

The far more important question is: How did this one particular group of
anthropoid animals of the Miocene come to surpass all its cousins, and
all the rest of the mammals, in brain-development? Let us first rid the
question of its supposed elements of mystery and make of it a simple
problem. Some imagine that a sudden and mysterious rise in intelligence
lifted the progenitor of man above its fellows. The facts very quickly
dispel this illusion. We may at least assume that the ancestor of man
was on a level with the anthropoid ape in the Miocene period, and we
know from their skulls that the apes were as advanced then as they are
now. But from the early Miocene to the Pleistocene is a stretch of
about a million years on the very lowest estimate. In other words,
man occupied about a million years in travelling from the level of the
chimpanzee to a level below that of the crudest savage ever discovered.
If we set aside the Java man, as a possible survivor of an earlier
phase, we should