CHAP. HI.] MAN NOT IN EUROPE IN MEIOCENE AGE. 69 



present apes are in the habit of making stone imple- 

 ments or of cutting bones, although they use stones for 

 cracking nuts. 1 



From the preceding pages the reader will have realised 

 how different Europe of the Meiocene age was from the 

 Europe of to-day ; that the climate was much warmer, 

 and that it was connected with Greenland, Spitz- 

 bergen, and North America ; and that on the land so 

 constituted, during the Eocene and Meiocene ages, 

 luxuriant forests extended northwards far into the 

 Polar regions. He will also have realised that, in 

 the European part of this vast forest-covered con- 

 tinent, there was not one living species of mammal 

 to be seen in the strange and varied fauna to herald the 

 order of things that was to be, although there were many 

 familiar trees and some reptiles, such as the alligator 

 and crocodile. When all this is taken into account, it 

 will be seen how improbable, nay, how impossible, it is 

 that man, as we know him now, the highest and most 

 specialised of all created forms, should have had a place 

 in the Meiocene world. The evolution of the animal 

 kingdom, recorded in the rocks, had at this time advanced 

 as far as, but no farther than, the Quadrumana, and it 

 seems to me not improbable that some of the extinct 

 higher apes may have possessed qualities not now found 

 in living members of their order. 



1 Even if the existing apes do not now make stone implements or cut 

 bones, it does not follow that the extinct apes were equally ignorant, 

 because some extinct animals are known to have been more highly organised 

 than any of the living members of their class. The Secondary reptiles 

 possessed attributes not shared by their degenerate Tertiary successors. 

 The Deinosaurs and Theriodonts had structural peculiarities now only met 

 with in the birds and the mammalia. 



