34 TRANS. ST. LOUIS ACAD. SCIENCE. 



some considerable area ; just as the pairs and species of apes now 

 exist, and always must have existed since they were apes at all. 

 That change of form in which lies the ascent of type that is trans- 

 mitted must take place as a gradual transition along the branch- 

 ing ideal thread of embryological evolution, in whatever lines of 

 •distribution over space : it cannot be and continue in one indivi- 

 dual, or in one pair only, but must come to exist simultaneously 

 in many or all at once. So that wherever in the course of evolu- 

 tion and new creation of artistic type of form (for every new 

 form is a new creation), a type appears which would unhesi- 

 tatingly be pronounced human, we may be sure it would not be 

 in one individual or in one pair only, but in a whole tribe of pairs, 

 if it were to survive and be continued. It is apparent that this 

 might take place over one widely extended area, or simultane- 

 ously in two or more widely separated areas, or in one quite 

 limited area only. In either case, if we go back (as zoological 

 science requires) to the beginning of the whole order Primates. 

 we might expect to find (what appears to be the fact) that the 

 synthetic ordinal type of the common ancestors of all mankind 

 and of all ape-kind existed simultaneously in the Palaearctic, 

 Nearctic, Oriental, and African provinces alike. But since it 

 appears that the anthropoid apes once extended from France to 

 Borneo and South Africa, the same may just as well have been 

 true of the most primitive human progenitors ; and the transition 

 from ape-like creatures to the distinctly human form might be as 

 likely to take place in one part as in another of that whole area ; 

 and it may have taken place, and most probably did take place, 

 in many parts, contemporaneously, but with differences in the 

 several distinct areas analogous to the differences which distin- 

 guish the different species of apes, fossil or living, in those same 

 areas, and resembling the differences which still distinguish the 

 existing varieties of mankind. 



Considering the human race from that first beginning when it 

 became distinctly human in form and faculty, it is manifest that 

 there must have been such an enormous succession of genera- 

 tions, tribes, and nations, — such continuity of new creation and 

 extinction, of migration and commixture, in whatever branching 

 directions of evolution and distribution, " in that dark backward 

 and abysm of time," that any accurate or complete tracing of 



