417 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



Man 



2042. MAN EMPHASIZES NA- 

 TURE'S VARIATIONS We cannot sup- 

 pose that all the breeds were suddenly pro- 

 duced as perfect and as useful as we now 

 see them; indeed, in many cases, we know 

 that this has not been their history. The 

 key is man's power of accumulative selec- 

 tion: Nature gives successive variations; 

 man adds them up in certain directions use- 

 ful to him. In this sense he may be said to 

 have made for himself useful breeds. 

 DARWIN Origin of Species, ch. 1, p. 26. 

 (Burt.) 



2043. MAN, EVIDENCES OF HIS 

 RECENT ORIGIN Fossils of Existing Or- 

 ganisms Where Still No Human Trace. 

 Thus, for example, in the deposits called the 

 " northern drift," or the glacial formation 

 of Europe and North America, the fossil 

 marine shells can easily be identified with 

 species either now inhabiting the neighbor- 

 ing sea, or living in the seas of higher lati- 

 tudes. Yet they exhibit no memorials of 

 the human race, or of articles fabricated by 

 the hand of man. Some of the newest of 

 these strata, passing by the name of " raised 

 beaches," occur at moderate elevations on 

 the coast of England, Scotland, and Ireland. 

 Other examples are met with on a more ex- 

 tended scale in Scandinavia, as at the height 

 of 200 feet at Uddevalla in Sweden, and at 

 twice that elevation near Christiania in 

 Norway, also at an altitude of 600 or 700 

 feet in places farther north. They consist 

 of beds of sand and clay, filling hollows in a 

 district of granite and gneiss, and they must 

 closely resemble the accumulations of shelly 

 matter now in progress at the bottom of the 

 Norwegian fiords. The rate at which the 

 land is now rising in Scandinavia is far too 

 irregular in different places to afford a safe 

 standard for estimating the minimum of 

 time required for the upheaval of the funda- 

 mental granite, and its marine shelly cover- 

 ing, to the height of so many hundred feet; 

 but according to the greatest average, of five 

 or six feet in a century, the period required 

 would be very considerable, and nearly the 

 whole of it, as well as the antecedent epoch 

 of submergence, seems to have preceded the 

 introduction of man into these parts of the 

 earth. LYELL Principles of Geology, bk. i, 

 ch. 13, p. 184. (A., 1854.) 



2044. MAN, FOSSIL REMAINS OF 

 Not an Ape-like Creature Tools and Im- 

 plements Show Primeval Man Thoroughly 

 Human. In conclusion, I may say that the 

 fossil remains of man hitherto discovered 

 do not seem to me to take us appreciably 

 nearer to that lower pithecoid form by the 

 modification of which he has, probably, be- 

 come what he is. And considering what is 

 now known of the most ancient races of 

 men; seeing that they fashioned flint axes 

 and flint knives and bone-skewers of much 

 the same pattern as those fabricated by the 

 lowest savages at the present day, and that 

 we have every reason to believe the habits 

 and modes of living of such people to have 



remained the same from the time of the 

 mammoth and the tichorhine rhinoceros till 

 now, I do not know that this result is other 

 than might be expected. HUXLEY Man's 

 Place in Nature, p. 253. (Hum.) 



2045. MAN HAS MYSTERIOUS 

 POWER OVER PUMA Even Child Safe 

 with South- American Lion. How strange 

 that this most cunning, bold, and blood- 

 thirsty of the Felidce [the puma], the perse- 

 cutor of the jaguar and the scourge of the 

 ruminants in the regions it inhabits, able 

 to kill its prey with the celerity of a rifle- 

 bullet, never attacks a human being! Even 

 the cowardly, carrion-feeding dog will at- 

 tack a man when it can do so with impu- 

 nity; but in places where the puma is the 

 only large beast of prey, it is notorious that 

 it is there perfectly safe for even a small 

 child to go out and sleep on the plain. At 

 the same time it will not fly from man ( tho 

 the contrary is always stated in books of 

 natural history) except in places where it 

 is continually persecuted. Nor is this all : 

 it will not, as a rule, even defend itself 

 against man, altho in some rare instances it 

 has been known to do so. HUDSON Natural- 

 ist in La Plata, ch. 2, p. 36. (C. & H., 

 1895.) 



2046. MAN HAS SELECTING POW- 

 ER Abstract Conceptions Self-contemplation. 

 There is such a gulf between the faculties 

 of his [man's] mind and those of the lower 

 animals that the forces acting on the human 

 spirit become, by comparison, innumerable, 

 and involve motives belonging to a wholly 

 different class and order. He is exposed, in- 

 deed, to the lower motives in common with 

 the beasts. But there are others which 

 operate largely upon him which never can 

 and never do operate upon them. Foremost 

 among these are the motives which man has 

 the power of bringing to bear upon himself, 

 arising out of his power of forming abstract 

 ideas, out of his possession of beliefs, and, 

 above all, out of his sense of right and 

 wrong. So strong are these motives that 

 they are able constantly to overpower, and 

 sometimes almost to destroy, the forces 

 which are related to his lower faculties. 

 Again, among the motives which operate 

 upon him man has a selecting power. He 

 can, as it were, stand out from among them 

 look down from above them compare 

 them among each other, and bring them to 

 the test of conscience. Nay, more, he can 

 reason on his own character as he can on the 

 character of another being estimating his 

 own weakness with reference to this and the 

 other motive, as he is conscious how each 

 may be likely to tell upon him. When he 

 knows that any given motive will be too 

 strong for him, if he allow himself to think 

 of it, he can shut it out from his mind by 

 " keeping the door of his thoughts." He 

 can, and he often does, refuse the thing he 

 sees, and hold by another thing which he 

 cannot see. He may, and he often does, 

 choose the invisible in preference to the 



