MESOZOIC AND CENOZOIC LIFE 443 
While evolution is as certainly proved for the lower forms of 
plants and animals as most scientific theories can be proved by 
man, with his limited capacities for observation and his precon- 
ceptions of logic, it cannot be said that the same is true for man. 
So far, the rocks have failed utterly to yield any positive proof 
that man is descended from lower animals. The most ancient 
skeletons that have been discovered, skeletons which have been 
buried five, ten, or perhaps even twenty thousand years, have per- 
fectly developed skulls; and the skull is the most characteristic 
feature in man to distinguish him from the nearest animal, the 
ape. Hence, although the ancient men whose remains have been 
discovered were savages, and lived in the crudest way, they were 
thinking men with the brain well developed. 
It would not be fair to leave this question here, however, for a 
discovery has recently been announced from Java, which may be 
the connecting link between man and his ancestors. This dis- 
covery is that of the skeleton of a man-like ape, or as some think, 
that of an ape-like man, in a stratum of rock, buried beneath a lava 
flow of a very ancient date. From this single discovery a general 
conclusion is not warranted, for it is by no means certain that this 
skeleton may not be that of some degenerate man. Some in fact 
have explained it as the skeleton of an idiot. 
If the evolutionary theory for the origin of man 
is correct, then as explorations continue among the 
rocks of Tertiary age, we should find the remains of 
this missing link. The fact that we have not, by no 
means disproyes the theory, but leaves it still a theory. 
No one has a right to anything more than an opinion 
upon the origin of man, so far as evidence from 
geology is concerned. 
