CH. XXI.] GENESIS OF MAN, INTELLECTUALLY. £91 



within half a dozen years from its promulgation, the theory 

 of natural selection was accepted by the great majority of 

 naturalists. How small the difference between the clumsy 

 waggons of the Tudor period and the lu ail -coach in which 

 our grandfathers rode, compared to the difference between 

 the mail-coach and the railway train ! How rapid the 

 changes in philosophic thinking since the time oi the Ency- 

 clo2')edistes, in comparison with the slow though important 

 changes which occurred between the epoch of Aristotle and 

 the epoch of Descartes ! In morality, both individual and 

 national, and in general humanity of disposition and refine- 

 ment of manners, the increased rapidity of change has been 

 no less marked. 



But these considerations are immensely increased in force 

 when we take into account those epochs which, in the light 

 of our present knowledge, can alone properly be termed 

 ti/ncient. Far beyond the comparatively recent period at 

 which human history began on the eastern shores of the 

 Mediterranean, extend the ages during which, as palaeon- 

 tology shows us, both the eastern and the western hemi- 

 spheres were peopled by races of men. Ten thousand cen- 

 turies before the time of Homer and the Vedic poets, wild 

 men, with brute-like crania, carried on the struggle for 

 existence with mammoths, tigers, and gigantic bears, long 

 since extinct. And recent researches make it probable that 

 even this enormous period must be multiplied six- or eight- 

 fold before we can arrive at the time when men first ap- 

 peared upon the earth as creatures zoologically distinct from 

 apes. The significance of these conclusions, even when we 

 take into account only the shorter epoch of a single million 

 f years, cannot be too strongly insisted upon. They show 

 us that it is only in recent times that man has become 

 widely distinguished from other animals by his capability of 

 progress. If, as evidence of our present progressiveness, we 

 cito the superiority of our Whitworth guns and Chassepot 



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