104 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



been more highly organized than any living members of their class." 

 Does not this reasoning exactly remind one of that which was current 

 when M. Boucher de Perthes first called attention to the Abbeville 

 flints ? 



Now, I confess I am at a loss to comprehend why Professor Daw- 

 kins should be so anxious to escape the natural inference that these 

 flints were split by an ancestor of man. If he were a determined oppo- 

 nent of evolutionism, it would be easy enough to understand his atti- 

 tude ; but, as he is a consistent and bold evolutionist, one can hardly 

 guess why he should go so far out of his way to get rid of a simple 

 conclusion. lie argues most sti'enuously that man was fully developed 

 in the Pleistocene age. He can not imagine that man reached this 

 full development by a sudden leap or miraculous interposition. And, 

 therefore, he might naturally conclude that an early and less differ- 

 entiated ancestor of man was living in the Miocene age, and develop- 

 ing upward through the Pliocene times, till he reached that highly 

 specialized specific form wdiich he had demonstrably attained in the 

 later Pleistocene period. Implements such as we should naturally ex- 

 pect a priori to be produced by such an intermediate form are actually 

 forthcoming in the Miocene. The traces of use and marks of fire 

 upon them seem irresistible proofs the edges are chipped and worn 

 exactly like those of undoubted flake-knives while the regular repe- 

 tition of their shapes is most noticeable. Yet, for some unknown rea- 

 son, rather than accept the plain conclusion of M. de Mortillet, Pro- 

 fessor Dawkins prefers to believe that they were produced by apes, 

 and to leave man without any traceable ancestry whatsoever. Surely 

 he does not believe that man was suddenly evolved, at a single bound, 

 from a creature no nearer akin to him " than the anthropomorphous 

 apes." Yet this is certainly the conclusion which most readers would 

 draw from his facts and arguments. 



It is clear that the difficulty in all these cases depends upon the too 

 great definiteness of our words, with their hard-and-fast lines of de- 

 markation, when applied to the gradual and changeful forms of evolv- 

 ing species. The very question as to the existence and character of 

 " primitive " man thus becomes one of mere artificial and arbitrary 

 distinctions. We try to draw a line somewhere, and wherever we 

 draw it we must necessarily cause confusion. Let us try, then, to set 

 forth the probable course of evolution in the line which finally cul- 

 minates in civilized man, from the Eocene age upward, using so far 

 as possible such language as will the least involve us in classificatory 

 distinctions. 



In the very first part of the Eocene age man's ancestors were very 

 plastic and unspecialized placental mammals of the early " generalized " 

 type. They were still so little removed from the original form, so little 

 adapted for special habits and habitats, that they at the same time 

 closely resembled the progenitors of the horses and the hedgehogs. 



