THE PEOPLING OF AMERICA. 309 



men. This is easily comprehended. Invoking the authority of 

 Murray, and the universality of habitat which he attributes to 

 the genera of the rorqual and the dolphin, polygenists might be 

 tempted to say : " Non-cosmopolitism already presents two ex- 

 ceptions ; why may there not be a third ? Two genera of ceta- 

 ceans are naturally represented in all the seas ; why may not the 

 human genus have appeared at the start in every land ? " 



This reasoning fails at the base. The rorquals and the dol- 

 phins belong to the lowest order of mammalia. Men, if we re- 

 gard the body alone, are the highest order. Unless we constitute 

 them a single exception, they must obey the laws of the superior 

 group ; consequently, they can not escape the law of progressive 

 cantonment. It follows, hence, that a human genus, as the po- 

 lygenists understand it, must have occupied in its origin an area 

 no more extended than that which has devolved on some genera 

 of monkeys. But, among the monkeys themselves, all natural- 

 ists recognize a hierarchy ; all place at their head the order of 

 the anthropoid apes. It is, then, from the secondary groups of 

 this family that polygenists should ask for indications of the 

 possible extent of the area primarily accorded to the human 

 genus; and you know how inconsiderable is the area of the genera 

 gibbon, orang, gorilla, and chimpanzee. You see that, at whatever 

 point of view we place ourselves, we have either to assume that 

 man alone escapes the laws that have regulated the geographical 

 distribution of all other organized beings, or to admit that the 

 primitive tribes were cantoned upon a very restricted space. By 

 judging from present conditions, by making the largest conces- 

 sions, by neglecting the incontestable superiority of the human 

 type over the simian type, all that the polygenist hypothesis per- 

 mits is to regard that area as having been nearly equivalent to that 

 occupied by the different species of gibbons, which range, on the 

 continent, from Assam to Malacca ; in the islands, from the Philip- 

 pines to Java. Monogenism, of course, tends to restrict this area 

 still more, and to make it equal at most to that of the chim- 

 panzee, which extends nearly from Cairo to the Senegal. I am 

 the first to recognize that we may perhaps have to enlarge these 

 limits at some later time. I consider the existence of tertiary 

 man to be demonstrated ; and only the geographical distribution 

 of the monkeys, his contemporaries, can furnish more precise 

 information upon the primary extension of the center of man's 

 appearance. Paleontology has taught us that the area formerly 

 occupied by the simian type was evidently more considerable 

 than it is now. It may have been the same with the anthro- 

 poid apes. But, till this time, no fossil is connected with that 

 family. You know that the Dryopithecus, which was long re- 

 garded as belonging to them, has been shown by the examina- 



