Geological Age of Man. 29 



of elephantine quadrupeds. As the living Indian elephant 

 is more intelligent than the African species, it may possibly 

 also be superior to all the extinct proboscidians of the 

 Sewalik group ; but if so, how could it supply even one of 

 those missing links in the chain of successive development 

 of which we stand in need \ For the superiority of man, as 

 compared to the irrational mammalia, is one of kind rather 

 than of degree, consisting in a rational and moral nature, 

 with an intellect capable of indefinite progression, and not 

 in the perfection of his physical organization, or those in- 

 stincts in which he resembles the brutes. 



If, therefore, the doctrine of successive development had 

 been palseontologically true, as I have endeavoured in this 

 discourse to show that it is not ; — if the sponge, the cepha- 

 lopod, the fish, the reptile, the bird, and the mammifer, had 

 followed each other in regular chronological order, the crea- 

 tion of each of those classes being separated from the other 

 by vast intervals of time ; and if it were clear that man had 

 been created later by at least one entire period — still I should 

 have been wholly unable to recognize in his entrance upon 

 the earth the last term of one and the same series of develop- 

 ments. Even then, the creation of man would rather seem 

 to have been the beginning of some new and different order 

 of things. 



By the creation of a species, I simply mean the beginning 

 of a new series of organic phenomena, such as we usually 

 understand by the term " species." Whether such com- 

 mencements be brought about by the direct intervention of 

 the First Cause, or by some unknown Second Cause or Law 

 appointed by the Author of Nature, is a point upon which I 

 will not venture to offer a conjecture. That some of these 

 species or series of vital phenomena occasionally come to an 

 abrupt termination in our own times, as they have done in 

 every preceding geological epoch, is no longer disputed, and 

 the arguments of those who imagine that new creations en- 

 tirely ceased from the moment that man was introduced into 

 the globe (the destroying agencies continuing in full activity 

 while the renovating power was suspended), appear to me 

 inconclusive and premature. It would be presumptuous to 



