THE SITE OF PARADISE. 325 
which as it is are very much diminished in number, will 
sooner or later completely succumb in the struggle for 
existence to the superiority of the Mediterranean races. 
The American and Australian tribes are even now fast 
approaching their complete extinction, and the same may 
be said of the Papuans and Hottentots. 
In now turning to the equally interesting and difficult 
question of the relative connection, migration, and primeval 
home of the twelve species of men, I must premise the 
remark that, in the present state of our anthropological 
knowledge, any answer to this question must be regarded 
only as a provisional hypothesis. This is much the same as 
with any genealogical hypothesis which we may form of 
the origin of kindred animal and vegetable species, on the 
basis of the “Natural System.” But the necessary un- 
certainty of these special hypotheses of descent, in no way 
shakes the absolute certainty of the general theory of 
descent. Man, we may feel certain, is descended from 
Catarrhini, or narrow-nosed apes, whether we agree with 
the polyphylites, and suppose each human species, in its 
primzeval home, to have originated out of a special kind of 
ape ; or whether, agreeing with the monophylites, we suppose 
that all the human species arose only by differentiation from 
a single species of primeval man (Homo primigenius). 
For many and weighty reasons we hold the monophyletic 
hypothesis to be the more correct, and we therefore assume 
a single prinueval home for mankind, where he developed 
out of a long since extinct anthropoid species of ape. Of 
the five now existing continents, neither Australia, nor 
America, nor Europe can have been this primeval home, 
or the so-called “ Paradise,” the “cradle of the human race.” 
