There is a method, well known to natural science, for measuring and indicating the divergence of man from his nearest allies. This is the application of those principles of classification which, though of essential importance in science, are by some modern students of nature strangely overlooked or misunderstood. Perhaps in nothing has the progress of ideas of evolution made a more injurious impress on the advance of knowledge than in the manner in which it has caused many eminent and able naturalists to diverge from all logical propriety in their ideas of classification. Still, in so far as man is concerned, there are some facts of this kind which are indisputable. He certainly constitutes a distinct species, including many races, which all, however, have common specific characters. On the other hand, no one pretends that he is _conspecific_ with any lower animal. All naturalists would now deride the stories, at one time current, that gorillas and chimpanzees are degraded races of men. On the other hand, even Haeckel admits that there is a wide gap, unfilled by any recent or any fossil creature, between man and the highest apes. Again, no _generic_ relationship can be claimed as between man and the lower animals. He presents such structural differences as entitle him to rank by himself in the genus _Homo_. Still further, the ablest naturalists, before the rise of Darwinism, held that man was entitled to be placed in a separate family or order from the apes. Modern evolutionists prefer to fall back on the old arrangement of Linnæus, and to place man and apes together in the group of Primates, which, however, Linnæus would not have regarded as precisely of the same value with an order as now held. In this those of them who have sufficient ability to comprehend the facts of the case are undoubtedly warped in judgment by the tendency of their philosophy to magnify resemblances and to minimize differences; while the herd of feebler men have their ideas of classification thoroughly confused by the doctrine which they have received as a creed dictated by authority, and to which they adhere under the influence of fear. In point of fact, the differences between man and any other animal are so wide that they warrant a distinction, not merely specific and generic, but of a family and an ordinal character.