498 ABSENCE OF INTERMEDIATE CHAP. xxiv. 



infant to the adult state, and from that to old age, and the 

 loss again and again of every particle of matter which had 

 entered previously into the composition of the body during 

 its growth, and the substitution of new elements in their 

 place, while the individual remains always the same, carries 

 the analogy a step farther. But beyond this we cannot push 

 the comparison. We cannot imagine this world to be a place 

 of trial and moral discipline for any of the inferior animals, 

 nor can any of them derive comfort and happiness from faith 

 in a hereafter. To man alone is given this belief, so con 

 sonant to his reason, and so congenial to the religious -senti 

 ments implanted by nature in his soul, a doctrine which 

 tends to raise him morally and intellectually in the scale of 

 being, and the fruits of which are, therefore, most opposite 

 in character to those which grow out of error and delusion. 



The opponents of the theory of transmutation sometimes 

 argue that, if there had been a passage by variation from the 

 lower Primates to Man, the geologist ought ere this to have 

 detected some fossil remains of the intermediate links of the 

 chain. But what we have said respecting the absence of 

 gradational forms between the recent and pliocene mammalia 

 (p. 436), may serve to show the weakness in the present state 

 of science of any argument based on such negative evidence, 

 especially in the case of man, since we have not yet searched 

 those pages of the great book of nature, in which alone we 

 have any right to expect to find records of the missing links 

 alluded to. The countries of the anthropomorphous apes 

 are the tropical regions of Africa, and the islands of Borneo 

 and Sumatra, lands which may be said to be quite unknown 

 in reference to their pliocene and post-pliocene mammalia. 

 Man is an old world type, and it is not in Brazil, the only 

 equatorial region where ossiferous caverns have yet been ex 

 plored, that the discovery, in a fossil state, of extinct forms 

 allied to the human, could be looked for. Lund, a Danish 





