Chesterton on "the mistake of merely evolutionary introductions and prefaces"

"Monkeys did not begin  pictures and men finish them; Pithecanthropus did not draw a reindeer badly and Homo Sapiens draw it well.  The higher animals did not draw better and better portraits; the dog did not paint better in his best period than in his early bad manner as a jackal; the wild horse was not an Impressionist and the race-horse a Post-Impressionist."

G. K. Chesterton, The everlasting man I.i ("The man in the cave") ((San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 1993 [1925]), 34-35).  I was put onto this by A. N. Wilson, "Reindeer pictures," Times literary supplement, 30 July 2010, p. 5.