Descent oe Man. 237 



the air he breathes, the water he drinks, the food he 

 eats, and the soil he is ultimately resolved into. 

 Further, although every animal organism is a com- 

 bination of unstable elements which ceaselessly add 

 themselves to the body and leave it again, yet that 

 same kaleidoscopic substance is indestructible, and re- 

 asserts itself in endless other forms throughout the 

 cycles of eternity. Man, therefore, in his matter 

 though not in his manner, in being though not in 

 form, is coeval with his cause, whatever it may be. 



2. The Date of Man's Origin. — The quaint con- 

 ception of man's divine creation some six thousand 

 years ago in the Garden of Eden has long been 

 discredited by criticism, disproved by geology, and 

 discarded by all intelligent men ; while recent dis- 

 coveries of pre-historic human remains practically 

 establish the existence of man in the miocene epoch 

 of the Tertiary age. This implies an antiquity of 

 hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years. 

 Further, if those pre-Adamites evolved from apes 

 or some ape progenitor, as Darwinians allege, then 

 that transformation at the same ratio of progress 

 must be anti-dated by other millions of years. 

 But, although Darwin propounded man's descent 

 from some common progenitor of the catarrhine 

 (narrow-nosed) or old-world apes, he added : — " We 

 must not fall into the error of supposing that the 

 early progenitor of the whole simian stock, including 

 man, was identical with or even closely resembled 

 any existing ape or monkey." According to Huxley, 



