EUROPE BEFORE ARRIVAL OF MAN 



Miocene : the machairodus, or sabre-toothed 

 lion, was much larger and more formidable than 

 any lion or tiger now existing. The same period 

 witnessed the arrival in Europe of true apes and 

 baboons, and even of two species of anthropoid 

 ape, allied to the gibbons, one of which, the 

 dryopithecus, was as large as a man, and has 

 been regarded as in some respects superior to 

 any modern anthropoid ape. 



Mr. Boyd Dawkins to whose admirable 

 treatise on " Early Man in Britain " this essay 

 is under great obligations argues forcibly 

 against the probability that man occupied Eu- 

 rope during any part of the Miocene period. 

 All the species of Miocene land mammals, and 

 several of the genera, are now extinct ; and Mr. 

 Dawkins urges that if man existed at that re- 

 mote period it is incredible that he alone should 

 have subsisted unchanged amid the destruction or 

 metamorphosis of all other species. But it seems 

 to me that Mr. Dawkins partly answers this 

 argument himself when he observes that, " were 

 any man-like animal living in the Miocene age, 

 he might reasonably be expected to be not man, 

 but intermediate between man and something 

 else, and to bear the same relation to ourselves 

 as the Miocene apes, such as the mesopithecus, 

 bear to those now living, such as the semnopi- 

 thecus." Why may not such a semi-human man 

 have existed in the Miocene age, the race hav- 

 23 



