688 THE LAST STEPS IN THE GENEALOGY OF MAN. 



tralians are equal to Europeans in tbe schools, tbey acquire language 

 with an extraordinary facility ; but the period comes, their savage na- 

 ture returns, they drop their clothes, rejoin their kind and manifest no 

 more intelligence than if the^' had never been among the whites. If at 

 our age we appear so capacious, intellectually speaking, it is that we 

 have accumulated for numerous years, that we reason from habit, in 

 great measure automatically ; we are constantly excited by the strug- 

 gle for existence, by the society of our equals, by the use of language 

 which the monkeys do not possess. 



The last argument of Vogt, that the young monkey is more human 

 than the adult, does not therefore convince me. 



1 have indicated the different current opinions, positive and negative, 

 on the derivation of man. Are there not others, poissible ? 



Although I have addressed many objections to Vogt, the very remark- 

 able uncertainty on the i)art of a man who does not fear habitually to 

 deliver himself, makes me reflect. I ask first what should be that com- 

 mon stock of the monkeys and man of which he speaks, and which is not 

 the lemurs (Cope's theory) ? Although Vogt leaves his reader in sus- 

 pense, it is easy to discover his tendency. That stock started from 

 some point in the ungulates. But if it is legitimate when one considers 

 the present species the evolved extreuiities of the branch, it is less 

 when one ascends towards the trunk before the specialization of the 

 ungulates, particularly in that which concerns the four limbs, pushed 

 to the extreme in two different ways, among the eqiiidiB and among 

 the ruminants. After that it mu.>t be said that nothing is imi^ossible 

 in nature, but the less probable things, when one sees their work, are 

 attained by the most unforeseen processes and the veriest by-ways. 

 That which selection by the hand of man gave to pigeons, a question 

 so well studied by Darwin, is done again in nature by the hand of 

 cliance, the laws and mechanism of which escape us, and which we 

 call by that name for just that reason. 



There is an objection to the descent of man from the monkey that I 

 have made, and which goes to the support of Vogt's thesis. As I have 

 said previously, tlie primordial type of mammifers — (which it is needless 

 here to separate into placental and aplacental, all the placentals have 

 certainly been aplacentals at their origin and the transition was pro- 

 duced insensibly witliout geology being able to establish at what time 

 this form is aplacental and that analogous one placental) — the primitive 

 type, I say, is with four limbs having already much that one can recog- 

 nize, their destination already written, the four set apart for locomo- 

 tion, but the anterior ones so as to serve moreover as organs of prehen- 

 sion and the posterior ones so as to serve essentially as organs of sui)port 

 and locomotion. This double specialization goes back to the reptiles, not 

 to speak of the dinosaurs, among which it is so marked. Some amphib 

 ians sliow traces of it. Among the most ancient mammals known in all 

 their parts, as the PJienacodus priniccvus of the Lower Eocene of the Ter- 

 tiary of Wyoming Territory, in the United States, the fore limb is well 



