CHAPTER X. 



THE ADVENT OF MAN. 



HITHERTO we have met with no trace of man or of his 

 works. Yet there have been in our upward progress 

 from the dawn of life mute prophecies of his advent. Man is 

 in his bodily frame a vertebrate animal and a mammal ; and 

 when first the Amphibians were introduced in the Palaeozoic, 

 the framework of man's body was already sketched out and 

 its principles settled. Those great reptilian lords, the biped 

 Saurians of the Mesozoic, already foreshadowed his erect 

 posture, though their limbs may have been more ornithic than 

 mammalian. The gradual advance in the brain development 

 of the Tertiary mammals presaged a coming time when mind 

 would obtain the mastery over claw and tooth and horn ; and 

 in the Miocene ages there was already some hint of the precise 

 style of structure in which this new creative idea would be 

 realised. Yet it might have been impossible to imagine 

 beforehand the vast changes which this new idea would inau- 

 gurate. In the lower animals such intelligence as they possess 

 is so tied to the physical organisation that it manifests itself as 

 a mechanical unvarying instinct. Man bursts this bond, and in 

 doing so revoludonises the whole scheme of nature. Old things 

 are now put to new uses, the face of nature is changed, varied 

 arts are introduced, and thought enters into the domain of 



