304 WALKS AND TALKS. 



removed. Man is free to possess the earth. With man in 

 possession of the earth there is room for no wider ranging 

 animal; there is place for no successor. 



Nature in man seems to have reached a period. While 

 other animals rise in steady gradation from lower to higher, 

 man proceeds by one grand leap to possess a rank and dignity 

 unapproached by his best predecessors. In intelligence, in 

 aesthetic perceptions, in moral sense, in religious susceptibility, 

 in theistic apperceptions, he stands separated by an unbridged 

 gulf from his mammalian fellows. Man is the capital and 

 completion of the long-rising column of organic life. The 

 structure is finished. 



Man's advent is geologically recent. No report of a human 

 relic has been made by any geologist, from any formation be- 

 low the Miocene. No report of Miocene or Pliocene man has 

 been corroborated by such evidence as to claim the sanction 

 of conservative geologists. European man is first a Quater- 

 nary phenomenon ; he dates from the epoch of flooded streams 

 and glacier decline. I had once thought Pliocene man existed 

 in America ; but for reasons explained in Talk XLIX, I am 

 led to suspect the lava outflow which provided his sepulcher 

 was an event of the Glacier epoch. It will be noticed that 

 European discussion always concerns the man who first in- 

 vaded Europe. We have no facts bearing on the date of 

 man's advent into Africa and Australia. He may have existed 

 there during the reign of ice in the north; he may have pre- 

 ceded the reign of ice. If Mongoloid man was in Europe 

 immediately on the decline of the glaciers, the lower races 

 should have lived somewhere in an earlier epoch. But this is 

 only a suggestion. 



Geological man, as far as known, was the equal of existing 

 races. The European Troglodytes were Mongoloids of the 

 grade of Esquimaux. There is no structural gradation from 

 man downward to half-men and apes. This has sometimes 

 been claimed, but the highest verdict opposes that claim. 



There are links missing between man and his mammalian 

 predecessors. Here is the prototype of the great gap between 



