192 The Bible of Nature 



existing anthropoid apes; it is a vulgar error to sup- 

 pose that scientific interpreters ever made any such 

 suggestion. It is Hkely, however, that Man arose 

 from an ancestral stock common to the anthro- 

 poid apes and to him. It therefore seems justi- 

 fiable to date the antiquity of the human race not 

 later than the time when the anthropoid apes are 

 known to have been established as a distinct 

 family. This takes us back to Miocene ages, 

 and that means many hundreds of thousands of 

 years ago. 



Is there not something extraordinarily impres- 

 sive in this antiquity of our race, all the more im- 

 pressive when we see that it is lost against the 

 background of the immensely greater antiquity of 

 the animal world, just as that is lost against the 

 unthinkable antiquity of the earth ? To those who 

 are always in a hurry for results, as they put their 

 shoulders to the wheel of the cumbrous wagon 

 of our civilization, is there not some lesson simply 

 in the time the past journey has taken? As 

 Lowell said, we must ''Learn by each discovery 

 how to wait.'* 



Man as a Mutation. — As to the actual origin of 

 Man, we can only say that facts point to his natural 

 evolution from an ancestral stock common to him 

 and to the anthropoid apes. He probably arose 

 by a mutation, that is to say, by a discontinuous 

 variation of considerable magnitude. From the 



