680 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



witnessed the growth of a ginko similar to the one in the north of 

 China. It had sequoias and a bald cypress corresponding with the 

 trees of those names that are now growing in California and Louisi- 

 ana. The beech seems to have been growing in the Arctic circum- 

 polar zone before it was introduced and extended throughout the 

 northern hemisphere. The same is doubtless the case with the hem- 

 lock, of which distinguishable traces have been found in Grinnell-land, 

 above the eighty-second degree of latitude, of a date much earlier 

 than that of its introduction into Europe. The well-established pres- 

 ence in both continents of many animals peculiar to the northern 

 hemisphere must be attributed to emigrations, if not from the pole, at 

 least from countries contiguous to the polar circle. This is obvious in 

 the case of the reindeer, bison, and stag ; but it ought to be equally 

 true in respect to animals of more ancient times, and, although we 

 have no other direct proofs of it than the abundance of the remains 

 of mammoths in upper Siberia, the same law doubtless includes the 

 elephants and mastodons. We mean here the species of these two 

 genera which were propagated from the north to the south, and were, 

 in America and Europe, the companions of primitive man. The con- 

 nection of the continental masses with their belt of hardly discontinu- 

 ous lands around the polar circle gives the key to all these phenomena. 

 The cause on which they depend would be constantly producing radi- 

 ations and consequently disjunctions of species and races, whatever 

 kingdom we may consider. 



Before leaving the questions that touch on the presumed origin of 

 man, we can not refrain from speaking of the relations which it has 

 been sought to establish between him and the pithecan apes. Primi- 

 tive man, according to some authors of the transformist school, was 

 an anthropomorphic ape, perfected physically as to his walk and erect 

 attitude, intellectually by the development of his cranial capacity, till 

 the moment when reasoning, or the faculty of abstraction and the 

 power of using articulate language, took in him the place of instinct. 

 Numerous and undeniable anatomical or physiological analogies of the 

 human body and those of the more highly organized monkeys, which 

 have no tails nor callosities on their paws, and whose faces and ways 

 have something singularly human, favor this system, at least in ap- 

 pearance. The pithecans have, however, other contiguities than purely 

 human ones. Their ways are rather analogous than directly assimi- 

 lable to those of man ; with other adaptations, they seem to have 

 followed a wholly different course of evolution. They are essentially 

 climbers, while man is exclusively a walker, and has always been pre- 

 disposed to the erect position. The highest monkeys, the anthropo- 

 morphous apes, walk badly and with difficulty. When they leave the 

 trees in which they live, their position is a stooping one, and they bend 

 down their toes so as not to touch the ground with the soles of their 

 feet. We have, then, reason not to admit the simian origin of man 



