nant races of the world, whom large-hearted
optimists regard as stages of retarded development, capable, under
tutelage, of advance to a level with the Caucasian, but who, in this
view of the case, would be but the weakening product of the "dying fall"
of the energy that produced the Greek, the Semite and the Nordic stocks.

So in the last instance, the ape and the lemur and all their derivatives
may be, not records of some of the many stages through which man has
passed in his process of evolution, sidetracked by the upward rush of
one highly favoured or fortunate line, nor yet an abortive branch from
the common trunk from which sprang both man and ape, but rather the last
degradation of a primaeval energy, producing in its declension these
strange caricatures of the Man in whose production it found its
achievement. In other words, the old evolutionary idea is exactly
reversed, and those phenomena once looked on as passed stages of growth,
become the memorials of a creative process that has already achieved,
and is now returning, with its fantastic manifestations in terms of
declining life, even to that primordial mystery whence it had emerged.

Granting this theory, the search for the "missing link," whether in the
geological strata below those that revealed the Piltdown skull, or in
the fastnesses of Central Asia, is as vain a quest as it has always
been. Primaeval man, as he is grudgingly revealed to us, may have been
the degenerate remainder of an earlier and fully developed race whose
records are buried in the sunken fastnesses of some vanished Atlantis or
Lemuria, as the races of the South Sea Islands may be less metamorphosed
remnants of the same stock. Into this infinitely degraded residuum of a
vanished race entered the new energizing force when the divine creative
energy came once more into operation, in the fullness of time, and the
Minoan, the Egyptian and the Greek came almost in an hour to their
highest perfection. So through the unnumbered ages of the world's
history, God has from time to time created man in His own image, out of
the dust of the earth, and man so made "a little lower than the angels"
has, also in time, fallen and forfeited his inheritance. Yet the process
goes on without ceasing, and in conformity with some law of divine
periodicity; but it is _Man_ that is created in the beginning, of his
full stature, even as is symbolically recorded in the Book of Genesis;
not a hairy quadrumana that