MAN'S FIRST APPEARANCE 1649 



probability of his having appeared on the earth in 

 the Miocene, because of the absence of higher placen- 

 tal mammals belonging to living species. It is most 

 unlikely that man should have belonged to a fauna 

 in which no other living species of mammal was 

 present. He belongs to a more advanced stage of 

 evolution than the mid-Miocene of Thenay. Up to 

 this time the evolution of the animal kingdom had 

 advanced no further than the Simiadae in the direc- 

 tion of man; and the apes then haunting the forests 

 of Italy, France, and Germany represent the highest 

 type of those on earth. 



We may also look at the question from another 

 point of view. If man were upon the earth in the 

 Miocene age, it is incredible that he should not have 

 become something else in the long lapse of ages, and 

 during the changes in the condition of life, by which 

 all the Miocene land Mammalia have been so pro- 

 foundly affected that they have been either extermi- 

 nated or have assumed new forms. Nor in the suc- 

 ceeding Pliocene age can we expect to find man upon 

 the earth, because of the very few living species of 

 placental mammals then alive. It is not until we ar- 

 rive at the succeeding stage, or the Pleistocene, when 

 living species of Mammalia began to abound, that 

 we meet with indisputable traces of the presence of 

 man on the earth. The rudely chipped implements 

 of the River-drift hunter lie scattered through the 

 late Pleistocene river deposits in southern and east- 

 ern England in enormous abundance, and as a rule 

 in association with the remains of animals of Arctic 

 and of warm habit, as well as some one or other of the 



