222 DARWINISM STATED BY DARWIN HIMSELF. 



tinct species of the same region. It is, therefore, prob- 

 able that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes 

 closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee ; and, as these 

 two species are now man's nearest allies, it is somewhat 

 more probable that our early progenitors lived on the 

 African Continent than elsewhere. But it is useless to 

 speculate on this subject ; for two or three anthropomor- 

 phous apes, one the Dryopithecus of Lartet, nearly as 

 large as a man, and closely allied to Hylobates, existed 

 in Europe during the Miocene age ; and since so remote 

 a period the earth has certainly undergone many great 

 revolutions, and there has been ample time for migration 

 on the largest scale. 



At the period and place, whenever and wherever it 

 was, when man first lost his hairy covering, he probably 

 inhabited a hot country ; a circumstance favorable for 

 the frugiferous diet on which, judging from analogy, he 

 subsisted. We are far from knowing how long ago it 

 was when man first diverged from the Catarrhine stock ; 

 but it may have occurred at an epoch as remote as the 

 Eocene * period ; for that the higher apes have diverged 

 from the lower apes as early as the Upper Miocene period 

 is shown by the existence of the Dryopithecus. We are 

 also quite ignorant at how rapid a rate organisms, whether 

 high or low in the scale, may be modified under favorable 

 circumstances; we know, however, that some have re- 

 tained the same form during an enormous lapse of time. 

 From what we see going on under domestication, we learn 

 that some of the co-descendants of the same species may 

 be not at all, some a little, and some greatly changed, all 

 within the same period. Thus it may have been with 



* Eocene. — The earliest of the three divisions of the Tertiary epoch of 

 geologists. Rocks of this age contain a small proportion of shells identi- 

 cal with species now living. 



