2 JOHN READK ON 



of the Niuétoenth Dynasty were acqiiaiuted Avith the main race divisions — bkick, red, 

 brown, yellow and white — with which we are familiar in our own generation. AVhen, 

 however, we contemplate the gulf that separates the Caucasian from the negro, we must 

 conclude that, compared with the duration of man's life on earth, that remote period is 

 but as yesterday.' 



From what order of primitive men did the various races descend ? One distinguished 

 geologist maintains that there is " no ground for the belief in the existence, even in the most 

 ancient times, of any race of men more rude than the modern semi-civilized races or less 

 developed physically."' This view, of course, the evolutionist cannot hold. His theory 

 necessitates a transitional stage from the infra-human to the human, and the beings in 

 whom the high characteristics of humanity would be first dimly recognizable were 

 probably of the type that would suggest what the witty poet called the " prentice hand " 

 of Nature. Prof. Grant Allen has drawn for us a picture of a " tall and hairy creature, 

 more or less erect, but with a sloiiching gait, black-faced and whiskered, with prominent 

 prognathoiis muzzle and large prominent, canine teeth ;" whose " forehead was, no doubt, 

 low and retreating, with bony bosses iinderlying the shaggy eye-brows, which gave him a 

 fierce expression, something like that of a gorilla."'^ That such a creature existed Mr. Allen, 

 considers an " inevitable corollary from the general principles of evolution." "What such 

 a primitive being would look like may be imagined from Mr. Cushiug's ideal repre- 

 sentation of the Neanderthal man, which forms the frontispiece to Mr. J. P. McLean's 

 '' Manual of the Antiquity of Man." Whether they paint his jjortrait or leave his linea- 

 ments to conjecture, all writers of the development school and some who do not belong to 

 it select, as the Adam of their Seplier Toldolh, a type compared with which no savage of the 

 present could be regarded as degenerate. Professor "Winchell, referring to what, until not 

 very long ago, was considered the orthodox view of the first man, writes as follows : 

 " Those who hold that the white race, the consummate flower of the tree, has served as the 

 root from which all inferior races have ramified, may select their own method of rearing 

 a tree with its roots in the air and its blossoms in the ground. I shall put the tree in its 

 normal position.* Fixing upon the Australians as the lowest extant type of humanity, he 

 gives the Pre- Australian the second place in his affiliated classification of mankind, taking 

 as its cradle a hypothetical continent in the Indian Ocean, of which the Malagasy Archi- 

 pelago is the visible remnant. From this central " Lemuria," as it has been named (but 

 which Mr. A. R. "Wallace claims to have proved Utopian"), Professor Winchell attempts 



' In a u.sefal little work, calleJ the Doveloi^ment Theory, by Joseph and Mary Bersen, an attempt is made, by 

 means of a diagram, to convey a notion of the po.'sible antiquity of mankind. A diminutive square represents the 

 time from the earliest historical period to the present; a larger square, the time since the close of the last glacial 

 period; a still larger square, the time sini'e the beginning of the penultimate glacial period ; and, finally, a very 

 much larger square, the time since the beginning of the Tertiary. The question is one, it need hardly be said, on. 

 which much difference of opinion exists. AVhile some demand millions of years for the development of primitive 

 man into the man of the river-drift, others are satisfied with from eight to ten thousand years for the whole period 

 of man's life on earth. Sir William Dawson, for instance, writes (Fossil Men, p. 246) : "What evidence the future 

 may bring forth I do not know, but that available at present points to the appearance of man, with all his powers 

 and properties, in the Post-glacial age of Geology, and not more than from 0,000 to 8,000 years ago." 



2 Fossil Men, etc., by Sir J. W. Dawson, p. 249. 



^ " Who was Primitive Man ? " in Fortnightly Review, and Popular Science Monthly, Nov., 1882. 



* Preadamites, p. 297- '' Island Life, p. 371. 



