duke Orang Outang, or
to the princess Chimpanzee. After thinking it all over, I came to the
conclusion that I liked that doctrine. I became convinced in spite of
myself. I read about rudimentary bones and muscles. I was told that
everybody had rudimentary muscles extending from the ear into the cheek.
I asked: "What are they?" I was told: "They are the remains of
muscles; that they became rudimentary from lack of use; they went into
bankruptcy. They are the muscles with which your ancestors used to flap
their ears." I do not now so much wonder that we once had them as that
we have outgrown them. After all I had rather belong to a race that
started from the skulless vertebrates in the dim Laurentian seas,
vertebrates wiggling without knowing why they wiggled, swimming without
knowing where they were going, but that in some way began to develop,
and began to get a little higher and a little higher in the scale of
existence; that came up by degrees through millions of ages through
all the animal world, through all that crawls and swims and floats and
climbs and walks, and finally produced the gentleman in the dug-out; and
then from this man, getting a little grander, and each one below calling
every one above him a heretic, calling every one who had made a little
advance an infidel or an atheist--for in the history of this world the
man who is ahead has always been called a heretic--would rather come
from a race that started from that skulless vertebrate, and came up and
up and up and finally produced Shakespeare, the man who found the human
intellect dwelling in a hut, touched it with the wand of his genius and
it became a palace domed and pinnacled; Shakespeare, who harvested all
the fields of dramatic thought, and from whose day to this, there have
been only gleaners of straw and chaff--I would rather belong to that
race that commenced a skulless vertebrate and produced Shakespeare, a
race that has before it an infinite future, with the angel of progress
leaning from the far horizon, beckoning men forward, upward and onward
forever--I had rather belong to such a race, commencing there, producing
this, and with that hope, than to have sprung from a perfect pair upon
which the Lord has lost money every moment from that day to this.

CONCLUSION.

I have given you my honest thought. Surely investigation is better than
unthinking faith. Surely reason is a better guide than fear. This world
should be controlled by th