The foregoing inquiry brings us to the consideration of mongrel or hybrid. The mongrel is the crossing of different varieties of the same species and is FERTILE. The hybrid is the crossing of two different species, and is STERILE. The common barn fowl is the most familiar example of the former; the mule, of the latter. The barn fowl breeds freely; the mule is sterile.
The instinct of the animal is to keep the race pure. No one has ever seen a creature half cat and half dog, or half horse and half cow. Why this instinct? Simply that God made the animal " after his kind," of which more when we come to the Bible condemnation of evolution. The only hybrids known generally, whether animal or vegetable, are those brought about by man's arrangement, as, for instance, the mule, offspring of jackass and mare. Left to nature we get no such hybrid, and when it is obtained, it is sterile.
If we quote Huxley on this subject it will be fair, for he was in great sympathy with Darwin's views. The capitals are ours.
" If you breed from the male and female of the SAME RACE, you of course have offspring of the LIKE KIND, and if you make the offspring breed together, you obtain the SAME RESULT, you will still have the SAME KIND of offspring; THERE IS NO CHECK. But if you take members of TWO DISTINCT SPECIES, however SIMILAR they may be to each other, and make them breed together, YOU WILL FIND A CHECK. If you cross two such species with each other, then—although you may get offspring in the case of the first cross, yet, if you attempt to breed from the products of that crossing, which are what are called hybrids—then the result is, that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, you will get no offspring at all; there will be no result whatever.
" The reason for this is quite obvious in some cases; the female hybrids, although possessing all the external appearances and characteristics of perfect animals, are physiologically imperfect and deficient in the structural parts of the reproductive elements necessary to generation. It is said to be invariably the case with the male mule, the cross between the ass and the mare, and hence it is, that although crossing the horse with the ass is easy enough, and is constantly done as far as I am aware, if you take two mules, a male and a female, and endeavor to breed from them, you get no offspring whatever; no generation will take place. This is what is called the sterility of the hybrids between distinct species " (Huxley, " On the Origin of the Species, p. 212).
There is a greater likeness, structurally and in every detail, between a horse and an ass, than between a man and an anthropoid ape. Yet nature tells you each is "after his kind," and will not allow a cross. Thousands of years ago there were horses and asses, in shape and character the same as today. The Bible mentions horses and asses in Egypt in the time of Joseph. Why then, following up a similar line of thought, should an anthropoid ape develop into a man? The horse and ass are alike in having four feet and a tail. The man has two feet and two hands and no tail. The ape has four hands and a tail. The horse and ass walk on all fours. The man alone in God's creation walks erect on two feet. The bird is the nearest to this, but man's method of locomotion is quite unique. The ape is at home in the trees, and is awkward and defenseless on the ground. His forehands are made for arboreal locomotion, man's are not made for locomotion, but for higher uses.
We conclude that if two species so close in construction and appearance as the horse and ass do not and cannot blend, two species so far apart as the man and the ape cannot blend. And there is not one fact in nature, nor one scrap of evidence in geology or paleontology to prove otherwise.