220 Scientific Sophisms. 



elsewhere. But it is useless to speculate on this 

 subject, for an ape nearly as large as a man 

 . . . existed in Europe during the Upper 

 Miocene period ; and since so remote a period 

 the earth has certainly undergone many great 

 revolutions, and there has been ample time for 

 migration on the largest scale." l Man's pro- 

 genitors therefore, like this ape, may have been 

 Europeans, yet Europe, no less than Africa or 

 Asia, has hitherto utterly failed to furnish any 

 fossil remains, either of the immediate, or of the 

 remote, progenitors of man. 



"The fossil remains of man hitherto dis- 

 covered," says Prof. Huxley, " do not seem to 

 me to take us appreciably nearer to that lower 

 pithecoid form, by the modification of which 

 he has, probably, become what he is. ... 

 Where then must we look for primeval man ? 

 Was the oldest Homo sapiens pliocene, or 

 miocene, or yet more ancient ? In still older 

 strata do the fossilized bones of an ape more 

 anthropoid, or a man more pithecoid than any 

 yet known await the researches of some un- 

 born palaeontologist ? Time will show." 



So be it : dies declarabit. But, meantime this 

 doctrine of man's derivation from an unknown 

 ape, in an undiscovered continent, rests by the 

 1 " Descent of Man," vol. i. p. 199. 



