DIFFICULTIES OF DEVELOPMENT, ETC. 65 



natural selection into so specialized and altogether distinct a creature 

 as man, must have risen at a very early period into the position of a 

 dominant race, and spread in dense waves of population over all suit- 

 able portions of the great continent for this, on Mr. Darwin's hy- 

 pothesis, is essential to rapid developmental progress through the 

 agency of natural selection. 



Under these circumstances we might certainly expect to find some 

 relics of these earlier forms of man along with those of animals which 

 were presumably less abundant. Negative evidence of this kind is 

 not very weighty, but still it has some value. It has been suggested 

 that as apes are mostly tropical, and anthropoid apes are now confined 

 almost exclusively to the vicinity of the equator, we should expect the 

 ancestral forms also to have inhabited these same localities West 

 Africa and the Malay Islands. But this objection is hardly valid, 

 because existing anthropoid apes are wholly dependent on a perennial 

 supply of easily-accessible fruits, which is only found near the equator, 

 while not only had the south of Europe an almost tropical climate in 

 Miocene times, but we must suppose even the earliest ancestors of 

 man to have been terrestrial and omnivorous, since it must have taken 

 ages of slow modification to have produced the perfectly erect form, 

 the short arms, and the wholly non-prehensile foot, which so strongly 

 differentiate man from the apes. 



The conclusion which I think we must arrive at is, that if man 

 has been developed from a common ancestor with all existing apes, 

 and by no other agencies than such as have affected their development, 

 then he must have existed in something approaching his present form, 

 during the Tertiary period and not merely existed, but predominated 

 in numbers, wherever suitable conditions prevailed. If, then, con- 

 tinued researches in all parts of Europe and Asia fail to bring to light 

 any proofs of his presence, it will be at least a presumption that he 

 came into existence at a much later date, and by a much more rapid 

 process of development. In that case it will be a fair argument that, 

 just as he is in his mental and moral nature, his capacities and aspira- 

 tions, so infinitely raised above the brutes, so his origin is due to 

 distinct and higher agencies than such as have aflected their develop- 

 ment. 



There is yet another line of inquiry bearing upon this subject to 

 which I wish to call your attention. It is a somewhat curious fact 

 that, while all modern writers admit the great antiquity of man, most 

 of them maintain the very recent development of his intellect, and 

 will hardly contemplate the possibility of men, equal in mental ca- 

 pacity to ourselves, having existed in prehistoric times. This ques- 

 tion is generally assumed to be settled by such relics as have been 

 preserved of the manufactures of the older races, showing a lower and 

 lower state of the arts by the successive disappearance in early times 

 of iron, bronze, and pottery ; and by the ruder forms of the older flint 



TOL. X. 5 



