THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 



served. For man himself might have become 

 transformed in his structure, and his bones might 

 differ from ours. Might it not be possible that 

 his bones might look so strange to us that 

 scientists might have described them as belong- 

 ing to some other being, little aware of the fact 

 that these remains represented just the thing for 

 which they were looking? 



Similar ideas have ever played a role in various 

 tales and legends. There, we read that the men 

 of the primitive world were gnomes, or again 

 giants, Cyclopes with one eye, or fauns with 

 goat's feet, tails and pointed ears. When mam- 

 moth bones were first found, it was said that 

 they were the actual remains of such old fabulous 

 men, bones of the giants Gog and Magog, or of 

 St. Christopher. Of course, this was nonsense, 

 and the supposed human bones were nothing 

 but honest mammoth bones with no relation to 

 primitive man. But, we of to-day have really 

 something better than mere remains to rely on, 

 we have reliable scientific data for the theory 

 that men with essentially different characteris- 

 tics from ours existed not so very long ago. 



I mentioned, a while ago, that we have remains 

 of skeletons of men who lived in the ice age, 

 the age of mammoths. But these men of the 



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