he has but little sense of smell; he has lost the hairy covering, and is obliged to help himself by clothes.[1] If this loss was ornamental it is quite unlike any other development in this respect, since no other creature has the same; for ornamental purposes the fur becomes coloured, spotted, and striped, but not lost.  It is easy to reply that man being intelligent, his brain power enables him to invent clothes, arms, implements, and so forth, which not only supply all deficiencies of structure, but give him a great superiority over all creatures.  But how did he get that intelligence?  By what natural process of causation (without intelligent direction) is it conceivable that, given a species of monkey, all at once and at a certain stage, structural development should have been retarded and actually reversed, and a development of brain structure alone set in?  Nor, be it observed, has any trace of man with a rudimentary brain ever been discovered.  Savages have brains far in excess of their requirements, and can consequently be educated and improved.  The skull of a prehistoric man found in the Neanderthal near Dusseldorf is of average brain capacity, showing that in those remote ages man was very much in capacity what he is at present.

[Footnote 1:  It is remarkable that the loss of the hairy covering is most complete when it is most wanted:  the back, the spine, and the shoulders are in nearly all races unprotected; and yet the want of a covering from the heat or cold is such that the rudest savages have invented some kind of cloak for the back.]

It must, however, be admitted that the special difficulties of the origin of man are not purely structural.  We do not know enough of the Divine plan to be able to understand why it is that there is a certain undeniable unity of form, in the two eyes, ears, mouth, limbs and organs generally of the animal and man.  Moreover, much is made of the fact, as stated by a recent “Edinburgh Reviewer,” that “the physical difference between man and the lowest ape is trifling compared with that which exists between the lowest ape and any brute animal that is not an ape.[1]” This fact no doubt negatives the idea put forward by Bishop Temple and others, that if there was an evolution of man, it must have been in a special branch which was foreseen and commenced very far back in the scale of organic being.  For the structural difference might not require such a separate origin; while the mental difference, affording objections of a different class, will not allow of any such evolution at all.  That there is some connection between man and the animal cannot be denied, and consequently, in the absence of fuller information, very little would be gained by insisting on the purely physical development question.  The Bible states positively that the man Adam (as the progenitor of a particular race, at any rate) was a separate and actual production, on a given part of the earth’s surface.  All that we need conclude regarding that is that there is nothing known which entitles us to say, “This is not a fact, and therefore is not genuine revelation.”