described by Du Bois? Where shall we stop on his trail? I had almost
said "step on his tail," for we undoubtedly, if we go back far
enough, come to a time when man had a tail. Every unborn child at a
certain stage of its development still has a tail, as it also has a
coat of hair and a hand-like foot. But could we stop with the tailed
man--the manlike ape, or the apelike man? Did his Creator start him
with this appendage, or was it a later suffix of his own invention?

If we once seriously undertake to solve the riddle of man's origin,
and go back along the line of his descent, I doubt if we can find
the point, or the form, where the natural is supplanted by the
supernatural as it is called, where causation ends and miracle
begins. Even the first dawn of protozoic life in the primordial seas
must have been natural, or it would not have occurred,--must have
been potential in what went before it. In this universe, so far as
we know it, one thing springs from another; the sequence of cause
and effect is continuous and inviolable.

We know that no man is born of full stature, with his hat and boots
on; we know that he grows from an infant, and we know the infant
grows from a fetus, and that the fetus grows from a bit of nucleated
protoplasm in the mother's womb. Why may not the race of man grow
from a like simple beginning? It seems to be the order of nature; it
IS the order of nature,--first the germ, the inception, then the
slow growth from the simple to the complex. It is the order of our
own thoughts, our own arts, our own civilization, our own language.

In our candid moments we acknowledge the animal in ourselves and in
our neighbors,--especially in our neighbors,--the beast, the shark,
the hog, the sloth, the fox, the monkey; but to accept the notion of