AS A TEST OF MENTAL CAPACITY. 109 



M. de Quatrefages being a strenuous opponent of the Darwinian theory, of which Dr. 

 Brinton is a no less decided supporter, while Mr. Wallace occupies, at least as regards the 

 mental endowments of man, an intermediate position. Yet their opinions on the question 

 under consideration are in close accord. All agree in holding that the human race is of 

 much greater antiquity than was formerly supposed, going back at least into the early 

 quaternary period. All are of opinion that the varieties, or " sub-species," which make 

 up this race, are of one stock, which had its origin in a single locality, and all find this 

 locality in the temperate zone of the eastern continent. They differ as to the precise 

 position, but the differences are not very wide, and are easily reconciled. Finally all 

 accord in placing the earliest men in a region and climate where their natural powers 

 would have the fullest expansion, and their surroundings would be most favourable for 

 the development of every faculty— where animals apt for domestication and plants suited 

 for cultivation would be ready at hand. M. de Quatrefages would find the cradle of the 

 human race in Asia, not far from the great central pile {massif) of the continent, and near 

 the region which gives birth to all the great streams which flow to the north, the east, 

 and the south.' Mr. "Wallace, in like manner, finds this birthplace in the " enormous 

 plateaux of the great Euro- Asiatic continent, extending from Persia right across Tibet and 

 Siberia to Manchuria, an area, some part or other of which probably offered suitable con- 

 ditions, in late Miocene or early Pliocene times, for the development of ancestral man." " 

 Dr. Brinton, for reasons which he sets forth with much force of argument, is inclined to 

 look for the cradle of tfhe species further westward, near the Atlantic in northwestern 

 Africa.'' 



These varying opinions may be reconciled in the same manner in which Dr. Schrader 

 has sought, not without success, to conciliate, or rather to combine, the views of those 

 archseologists who hold that the Aryan race had its primal home or place of development in 

 central Asia, near the Oxus, with the opinions of those who find this home in central or 

 eastern Europe, near the Danube. He holds that these localities were secondary centres, 

 formed after the migration of the earlier members of the race eastward and westward, from 

 their primitive home on the middle Volga.^ In like manner it may be suggested that cen- 

 tral Asia and north-western Africa were secondary centres, to which the earliest population 

 overflowed from its primal seat in some intermediate position. This primal home of the 

 species seems to be strongly indicated by historical and linguistic facts. The vast penin- 

 sula of Arabia, whose protecting deserts enclose fertile oases, some of them large enough 

 to be the seats of powerful kingdoms, lies midway between the two regions, Egypt and 

 Mesopotamia, in which the human race displayed in the earliest historical times its 

 capacity for the highest culture. Their civilization goes back certainly to a date five 

 thousand years before the Christian era, and probably to a long anterior period. The 

 latest inquiries have led to the opinion that this civilization may have had its beginning 

 in the quaternary or even in the pliocene era. '' In fact, it is doubtful whether Egypt 

 was ever occupied by a barbarous people. That its earliest inhabitants used implements 



' " Introduction à l'Etude des Races Humaines," p. 132 (18S7). 



' •' Darwinism," p. -IGO (1889). 



^ " Races and Peoples," p. 82 (1S90). 



* " Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples," part iv, chap. 14. 



' See Brinton (quoting G. de Lapouge) in " Races and Peoples," p. 129. Wallace, in " Darwinism," p. 460. 



