321 THE ARYAN QUESTION. vi 



The distance which separates the man of Spy from the 

 modern anthropoid ape is undoubtedly enormous; be- 

 tween the man of Spy and the Dryopithecus it is a little 

 less. But we must be permitted to point out that if the 

 man of the later quaternary age is the stock whence exist- 

 ing races have sprung, he has travelled a very great way. 



From the data now obtained, it is permissible to believe 

 that we shall be able to pursue the ancestral type of men 

 and the anthropoid apes still further, perhaps as far as 

 the eocene and even beyond.* 



These conclusions hold good whatever the age 

 of the men of Spy; but they possess a peculiar 

 interest if we admit, as I think on the evidence 

 must be admitted, that these human fossils are of 

 pleistocene age. For, after all due limitations, 

 they give us some, however dim, insight into the 

 rate of evolution of the human species, and indi- 

 cate that it has not taken place at a much faster 

 or slower pace than that of other mammalia. And 

 if that is so, we are warranted in the supposition 

 that the genus Homo, if not the species which the 

 courtesy or the irony of naturalists has dubbed 

 sapiens, was represented in pliocene, or even in 

 miocene times. But I do not know by what 

 osteological peculiarities it could be determined 

 whether the pliocene, or miocene, man was sufri- 



* " Where, then, must we look for primaeval Man ? 

 Was the oldest Homo sapiens, pliocene or miocene, or yet 

 more ancient? In still older strata do the fossilised bones 

 of an Ape more anthropoid <>r a Man more pithecoid than 

 any yel known a wail the researches of some unborn 

 palaeontologist?" — P. 208 supra. 



