628 THE BEGINNINGS OF LIFE. 



ducible from the history of the life of the globe ante- 

 cedent to the advent of Man, tending to prove that 

 many of the above-mentioned developmental divergences 

 cannot be regarded as constituting so many necessary 

 preliminary series. The palseontological records, so far 

 as they have been discovered, would rather encourage 

 a belief that we happen to live during one o{ those 

 great phases in the earth's history in which an aberrant 

 type, having within itself vast and altogether peculiar 

 capacities for improvement, has, on account of the 

 high development of these capacities, overrun the earth. 

 Those mysterious powers and natural tendencies, which 

 formerly sufficed to produce the great fish-like lizards 

 and crocodiles, and which, amongst birds, have ex- 

 pended themselves in the perfection of an elaborate 

 respiratory system and in the production of related 

 changes in their integumentary system and organs of 

 locomotion, seem, in the case of Man and of the race 

 from which he has been . developed, to have been ex- 

 pended in the production of much less obvious external 

 changes, although these have been accompanied by the 

 most important internal changes leading to the gradual 

 elaboration of the Brain, or principal Organ of Mind. 



An increased development of the Brain, however 

 initiated, and even when it gave to primaeval Man mental 

 powers very slightly in excess of those of the man-like 

 apes, would, after a time, as Mr. Wallace has ably shown ^, 



1 ' Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection,' 1870, p. 319. 



