106 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



between that of the anthropoid apes and that of the Neanderthal skull. 

 Such an intermediate stage must have been passed through at some 

 time or other, and the mid-Miocene is just about the time when one 

 would naturally expect it to have existed. The fact that no bones of 

 this man-like creature have yet been found militates very little against 

 the argument, for in all cases the mammalian remains, which we actu- 

 ally possess from any particular stratum, are a mere tithe of the spe- 

 cies which we know must have been living during the period when it 

 was deposited. And, after all, the works of man (or of a man-like 

 animal) are just as good evidence of his existence as his bones would 

 be ; for, as Sir John Lubbock rightly observes, the question is whether 

 men then existed, not whether they had bones or not. 



During the Pliocene period, the scent does not lie so well, and we 

 seem to lose sight for a while of man's ancestry. Such gaps are com- 

 mon in the geological history, and need surprise no one, considering 

 the necessarily fragmentary nature of the record, based as it is upon a 

 few stray bones or bits of flint which may happen to escape destruc- 

 tion, and be afterward brought to light. Some cut bones, however, 

 have actually been detected in Tuscan Pliocenes, and may possibly 

 bear investigation. Professor Dawkins, it is true, objects that the 

 presence of a piece of rude pottery together with the bones casts much 

 doubt upon their authenticity. But Professor Capellini, their discov- 

 erer, now writes that Mr. Dawkins is mistaken in this particular, and 

 that the pottery belongs to quite a different stratum from the bones. 

 Other marked remains have been discovered in Pliocene strata else- 

 where ; and worked flints have been detected in the gravels of St. 

 Prest, which, however, are of doubtfully Pliocene age. Nevertheless, 

 the ancestors of man must have gone on acquiring all the distinctive 

 human features during this period, and especially gaining increased 

 volume of brain. If we could find entire skeletons of our Miocene and 

 Pliocene progenitors, analogy leads us to suppose that naturalists would 

 arrange them as at least two, if not more, separate species of the genus 

 Homo. Whether we should call them men or not is a mere matter of 

 nomenclature ; but that such links in the chain of evolution must then 

 have existed seems to me indisputable. 



In the Pleistocene period, we come at last upon undoubted traces 

 of the existing specific man. The early Pleistocene strata show us 

 no very certain evidence ; but in the mid-Pleistocene we find the ear- 

 liest indubitable flint flake, split by chipping, and very different in type 

 from the workmanship of the supposed mid-Miocene man-like creature. 

 In the later Pleistocene we get the well-known drift implements. 

 Without fully accepting Professor Dawkins's argument that the drift- 

 men were human beings of quite a modern type, one may at least admit 

 that the remains prove them to have been really men of the actual species 

 now living men not much further removed from us than the Anda- 

 manese or the Digger Indians. Accordingly, we can not suppose that 



