WHO WAS PRIMITIVE MAN? 103 



little differentiated, as to be man only in the generic, not in the spe- 

 cific sense. 



Professor Boyd Dawkins, on the other hand, argues apparently 

 against the existence of man in any form in Miocene Europe. " There 

 is," he says, " one important consideration which renders it highly im- 

 probable that man was then living in any part of the world. No liv- 

 ino- species of land mammal has been met with in the Miocene fauna. 

 Man, the most highly specialized of all creatures, had no place in a 

 fauna which is conspicuous by the absence of all the mammalia now 

 associated with him. ... If we accept the evidence advanced in fa- 

 vor of Miocene man, it is incredible that he alone of all the mamma- 

 lia living in those times in Europe should not have perished, or have 

 changed into some other form in the long lapse of ages during which 

 many Miocene genera and all the Miocene species have become ex- 

 tinct." But, if I understand M. de Mortillet aright j this is just what 

 he means by distinguishing Tertiary from Quaternary man. Pro- 

 fessor Dawkins argues as though the animal which split the Abbe 

 Bourgeois's flints must either have been man or not-man ; but the 

 whole analogy of evolution would lead us to suppose that it was really 

 a " tertium quid " or half-man ; as Professor Dawkins himself sug- 

 gests, a creature " intermediate between man and something else," a 

 creature which should " bear the same relation to ourselves as the Mio- 

 cene apes, such as the Mesopithecus, bear to those now living, such as 

 the Semnopithecus" 



But Professor Dawkins, who seems strangely unwilling to admit 

 the existence of such an intermediate link, endeavors to account for 

 the split flints of the mid-Miocene by curiously round-about ways. " Is 

 it possible," he asks, " for the flints in question, which are very differ- 

 ent from the palaeolithic implements of the caves and river deposits, to 

 have been chipped or the bone to have been notched without the inter- 

 vention of man ? If we can not assert the impossibility, we can not 

 say that these marks prove that man was living in this remote age in 

 the earth's history. If they be artificial, then I would suggest that 

 they were made by one of the higher apes then living in France rather 

 than by man. As the evidence stands at present, we have no satis- 

 factory proof either of the existence of man in the Miocene or of any 

 creature nearer akin to him than the anthropomorphous apes. These 

 views agree with those of Professor Gaudry, who suggests that the 

 chipped flints and the cut rib may have been the work of the Dryo- 

 pithecus, or the great anthropoid ape, then living in France. I am, 

 however, not aware that any of the present apes are in the habit of 

 making stone implements or cutting bones, although they use stones 

 for cracking nuts." And, in a foot-note, Professor Dawkins further 

 observes : " Even if the existing apes do not now make stone imple- 

 ments or cut bones, it does not follow that the extinct apes were 

 equally ignorant, because some extinct animals are known to have 



