THE LAST STAGES IN THE GENEALOGY OF MAN. 179 



different men as forming a relative liomogen — a species, as M. de 

 Quatrefages contends. The most ancient human race, that of 

 Neanderthal, is in the same category. Its cranial capacity — that 

 is, that which really characterizes man — is still considerable and 

 higher than in the lowest existing hnman races. Between the low- 

 est mean of the capacity of the skull of human races, which I put 

 in round numbers at eleven hundred cubic centimetres, and the 

 mean of the highest anthropoid species, which I estimate at five 

 hundred and thirty cubic centimetres, the distance is jDrodigious 

 when we compare it with such slight mean differences — taking 

 account of the relation of brain-volume to that of the body — as 

 have been determined between the succeeding species, genera, 

 families, and orders of animals. The working of such a cerebral 

 transformation as this calls for would require a length of time 

 defying all our conceptions. 



Pliocene man has probably been found in America. Miocene 

 man is indisputable, although we have not yet been able to dem- 

 onstrate the fact. Now, it is in the Miocene that the monkeys 

 appear with their existing characteristics. Has man, then, been 

 constituted since they appeared ? Did the evolution choose an ani- 

 mal whose hind-limb was organized for a life in trees, was at once 

 hand and foot, when there were beside it and already previously 

 existing animals whose organization presented a part of the de- 

 sired characteristics ? There is little probability of it ; and con- 

 sidering, I repeat, the number of species which would have been 

 needed to reach the actual constitution of our brain, it seems 

 probable that the preparatory steps are rather taken in the Eocene 

 epoch at the expense of one of those condylarthra which had 

 already the principal morphological characteristics of man except 

 those relating to the brain, and which Mr. Cope has shown to be 

 intermediate between the marsupials and most of the recent mam- 

 mals. From this point could be made the differentiation corre- 

 sponding with different modes of life, which has given on one side 

 the ungulate and carnivorous branches and many others that dis- 

 appeared without forming a stock, and on the other side the 

 quadrumanous and human branches. 



The human type — that is, the type that was destined to result 

 in the astonishing brain-development that we know, and to which 

 all the rest is only accessory — had then a stem of its own — a stem 

 which was the most central continuation of the general primitive 

 trunk of the mammalia. In the present order of science, the 

 mammalian class, as a whole, is compared to a brandling tree, 

 having numerous principal limbs, each terminating in efflores- 

 cences higher in growth. These are our most specialized groups, 

 the EquidcB and the ruminants among the ungulates, the lion and 

 the dog among the carnivores, etc. In this new system the com- 



