PRIMITIVE MAN. 



r I ^HERE lias been much discussion concerning the 

 J_ locality where man first originated, and the common 

 opinion among a great many naturalists points towards 

 the sunken continent in the Indian Ocean. It seems to 

 have included Australia in the east and covered the Sunda 

 Islands reaching to Madagascar on the West. Presumably 

 it connected Asia and Africa with New Zealand. It has 

 been called Lemuria as the supposed home of the Lemurian 

 or monkey tribe. 



We will let the theory pass as probable, although we 

 think that it will be difficult to designate any definite 

 locality as the place of the origin of man, for it seems 

 that a change of surroundings may repeatedly have taken 

 place and this would have favored a higher development, 

 new conditions demanding new adaptations and eliciting 

 thereby new faculties. Lemuria must have been large 

 enough and its geography varied enough to have been a 

 territory in which the first man-ape could have appeared, 

 while the higher development of the race seems to have 

 taken place farther north in Central Europe. 



The human race, though still in a very brutish con- 

 dition, must have existed in the Antarctic Continent or 

 Lemuria before the separation of Australia from Asia. 

 In the Museum at Sidney there is a slab containing im- 

 prints of human feet which according to Professor 

 Klaatsch's opinion bear all evidences of having been 

 made by primitive man. A sandstone ledge of the same 



