that God had created fossil forms to deceive man, for some
incomprehensible purpose, could not long be maintained. Some of them
were inconsistent with the facts, others with common sense, and in due
time it was everywhere admitted that the earth is of remote duration and
has been inhabited by animals and plants for untold ages. Its structure
revealed its history; its annals were found to be written in the rocks;
its anatomy was full of the evidences of its origin.

When, not many years ago, men began to find the fossil remains of
ancient structures in the body of man himself, theology was brought face
to face with a problem as difficult to explain, from its special point
of view, as that of the fossils in the rocks. As the latter had
threatened and finally disproved the doctrine of the special creation of
the earth, so the former assailed the doctrine of the special creation
of man, and annihilated it in the minds of many eminent scientists. It
formed a prominent argument in favor of the theory of organic evolution,
and as such calls for consideration here, as a suitable groundwork for
our special theme.

The structures referred to may justly be called fossil, since they
present strong evidence of being the useless remains of structures which
played an active part in the bodies of some former animals. A
significant example of this exists in the vermiform appendix, a narrow,
blind tube descending from the caecum of man, and detrimental instead of
useful, since it is the seat of the frequently fatal disease known as
appendicitis. This tube, usually from three to six inches long and of
the thickness of a goose quill, is occasionally absent in man,
occasionally of considerable size. It is quite large, as compared with
the other intestines, in the human embryo, but ceases to grow after a
certain stage of development. The caecum is extremely long in some of the
lower vegetable-eating animals, and the vermiform appendix seems to be a
rudiment of the formerly extended portion of this organ. It is large in
the anthropoid apes, especially in the orang, in which it is very long
and spirally convoluted. Its survival in man as a useless and dangerous
aborted organ is a powerful argument in favor of his descent from the
lower animals.

In the brain of man and many of the lower vertebrates, hanging by two
peduncles, or strands of nerve fibre, from the thalami, or beds of the
optic nerve, is a small rounded or heart-shaped body of ab