THE EVOLUTION OF MAN 



ceding one. It might have existed as early as 

 the first third of the Tertiary period. By its ex- 

 ternal characteristics, we should certainly have 

 classed it among the genuine monkeys, and only 

 a few slight anatomical marks would have be- 

 trayed to the expert that he was not dealing with 

 a monkey of later descent, but with one in which, 

 so to say, the third generation of coming man 

 was still concealed. 



Now, it is peculiar that we have actually found 

 remains of monkey-like animals in the first third 

 of the Tertiary period. They were discovered 

 by the Spanish explorer Ameghino in Patagonia, 

 the extreme end of South America, and were 

 concealed in a layer of rock which must have 

 been developed toward the end of that first third 

 of the Tertiary period. We call this first third 

 the "Eocene" period, or in English the dawn of 

 the more recent period. When Ameghino first 

 analyzed one of these Patagonian monkey skulls, 

 it conjured up to his imagination the ghost of a 

 very small man, so that he called it "Homun- 

 culus," but it seems that after all this resem- 

 blance to man is not much greater than that of 

 the American monkeys of the Capuchin type, 

 and that group of Eocene monkeys evidently be- 

 longed to that class. It cannot be denied that the 



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