has "arrived," they have remained undeveloped. Probably he had a common ancestor with them, some dryopithecan of an extinct species. From that type sprang a new type already on the way to progress, the Pithecanthropus erectus. Finally, the anthropoid ancestor became one fine day the father of a scion, clearly superior to himself, a miraculously gifted being, man. Here, then, is no sign of the slow evolution and gradual progress, which is the doctrine held at present by Transformists. The Dutch botanist De Vries has shown us, in fact, that nature does leap: natura facit saltus. There would thus be crises, as it were, in the life of species. At certain critical epochs considerable differences of a specific value appear in their offspring. It is at one of these critical periods in the simian life that man has appeared as the phenomenal child of an anthropoid. He was born with a brain and an intellect superior to those of his humble parents; and on the other hand, he has inherited from them an organization which is only inadequately adapted to the new conditions of existence created by the development of his sensitiveness and his brain power. This intellect is not proportioned to his organization, which has not developed at the same rate; it protests against the discordances which adaptation has not yet had time to efface. But it will efface them in the future.
§ The Instinct of Life and the Instinct
of Death.
The greatest discrepancy of this kind is the knowledge of inevitable death without the instinct which makes it longed for.
