I.] GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS. 7 



Society (Jan. 4, 1897), Dr Munro remarked that the transition 



probably took place in a limited area, so that the 



chances of finding the intermediary links of this tion from Piio- 



stage were very small. On the other hand the 

 probability of finding erect beings with skulls in all 

 grades of development, from a slightly changed Simian type up to 

 that of civilised man, was enormously greater. He regarded the 

 erect posture as the most conspicuous line of demarcation between 

 man and the lower animals. From this standpoint the Java 

 skeleton would come under the category of human ; but if this 

 line of distinction was to be dependent in any degree on mental 

 phenomena, Dr Dubois was perfectly justified in regarding it as a 

 transitional form, because it was a long time after the attainment 

 of the erect posture before his religious, moral and intellectual 

 faculties became human characters. Many fossil remains of man 

 were intermediary links, which marked different stages in the 

 history of mankind, and the further back such investigations were 

 carried, the more simian-like did the brain-case become. If the 

 geological horizon of the Java man were correctly defined as the 

 borderland between the Pliocene and Quaternary [Pleistocene] 

 periods, one could form some idea how far back we had to travel 

 to reach the common stock from which men and anthropoids had 

 sprung. The lower races of to-day, he concluded, were also 

 survivals of intermediary links, which had been thrown into the 

 side eddies of the great stream of evolution. 



This greatly strengthens the view always advocated by me that 

 man began to spread over the globe after he had acquired the 

 erect posture, but while in other physical and in mental respects 

 he still differed not greatly from his nearest akin. But no doubt 

 he already possessed the rudimentary organs, and consequently 

 the germs, of speech, and this 1 , combined with his other advan- 

 tages, enabled him soon to acquire sufficient supremacy over all 

 other animals to constitute himself the one universal species. 

 Hence the range of man alone coincides with that of the habitable 

 world. Whether he had occupied the whole of this domain in the 



"He gave man speech, and speech created thought, 

 Which is the measure of the universe." 



Prometheus Unbound ', n. 4. 



