GENESIS OF MAN, INTELLECTUALLY 



selection was accepted by the great majority of 

 naturalists. How small the difference between 

 the clumsy wagons of the Tudor period and 

 the mail-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 

 of the Encyclopedistes, 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 disposi- 

 tion and refinement of manners, the increased 

 rapidity of change has been no less marked. 



But these considerations are immensely in- 

 creased in force when we take into account those 

 epochs which, in the light of our present know- 

 ledge, can alone properly be termed ancient. 

 Far beyond the comparatively recent period 

 at which human history began on the eastern 

 shores of the Mediterranean, extend the ages 

 during which; as palaeontology shows us, both 

 the eastern and the western hemispheres 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, 



the doctrine of special creations is doomed speedily to suffer 

 the fate in France which it has already suffered in Germany, 

 England, and America. 



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