THE BEGINXINGS OF LIFE. 629 



almost inevitably tend to give him that power over 

 natural products and forces which in the course of 

 ages has enabled him to make these forces subservient 

 to his own wants in a gradually increasing degree. 

 The altered mode of life also, which must have been thus 

 induced at a very remote period, is conceived by many to 

 have been sufficient — when acting through enormous 

 periods of time, and when supplemented by the suc- 

 cessively-acquired powers of speaking, writing, and 

 printing — to account for the vast progress that has 

 since been achieved both in his intellectual and in his 

 moral nature 1. 



But for such a continuous development of brain 

 to have taken place, with co-ordinate increase in 

 mental and moral attainments, we must naturally have 

 recourse to long periods of time— though not longer 

 perhaps than the period which we are now able to 

 claim. Thus, as Mr. Wallace says ^ : — <- We . can with 

 tolerable certainty affirm that man must have inhabited 

 the earth a thousand centuries ago j but we cannot say 

 that he positively did not exist_, or that there is any good 

 evidence against his having existed, for a period of ten 



^ Others, however, do not suppose that the moral nature of Man can 

 be thus naturally accounted for. Mr. Wallace, as well as Mr. St. George 

 Mivart (chap, ix), believe that at this particular stage of organic evolu- 

 tion some supernatural interposition must have taken place. Mr. Wallace, 

 indeed, cannot believe that some of the mere bodily peculiarities of Man 

 have been produced by the undisturbed action of natural agencies. (See 

 his ' Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection,' 1870, p. 333.) 



2 Loc. cit., 1870, p. 303. 



