94 ORGANIC EVOLUTION 



venture to call Java the " cradle of the race " on the 

 scanty evidence it affords. 



We must avow that the human race is descended 

 from an Old World monkey and not from any New 

 World monkey, because man, as we have already 

 seen, is most unquestionably related — so far as 

 physical characters, external and internal, skeletal, 

 dental and visceral, may be trusted — to the Old 

 World monkeys, much more nearly than are they 

 to the monkeys of the New World. This was con- 

 clusively proved by Huxley more than forty years 



ago. 



How, then, if Asia was the cradle of the race, do 

 we find men in America and in Australia ? The 

 question is pertinent, and the answer full of interest. 

 There is no reasonable doubt whatever that the 

 aboriginal men of the New World are really of 

 Mongolian origin. Their ancestors crossed over 

 from North-Eastern Asia to North America, who 

 shall say how long ago ? The evidence for this 

 belief is derived from many sources. This is not a 

 manual of anthropology, so I must content myself 

 by merely mentioning the yellow skin of the so-called 

 Red Indian, and by alluding to the extraordinary 

 resemblances, physical, social, and psychological, 

 which anthropologists have traced notably between 

 such races as the Aztecs and the modern Japanese. 



Then, as to the even more instructive case of the 

 Australasian aboriginal. His existence, like that of 

 the Australian mammals — such as the egg-laying 

 duckmole and the kangaroo — teaches us that, as 

 there are other reasons to believe, Australia was 

 once continuously connected by land with Asia. 



