498 ABSENCE OF INTERA EDIATE CUAI'. s.xiv. 



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 consonant 

 to his reason, and so congenial to the religious sentiments im- 

 planted 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 ai'e, 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 thei-e 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 wo have said respecting the absence of 

 gradational forms between the recent and pliocene mam- 

 malia (p. 436) may serve to show the w^eakness in the present 

 state of science of any argument based on such negative evi- 

 dence, 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 anthropomor- 

 phous aj)es 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 explored, that the discovery, in a fossil state, of extinct 

 forms aUied to the human, could be looked for. Lund, (^ 



