lU ftEPORT— 1876. 



dominaut race, and spread in dense ■waves of population over all suitable portions of 

 the great continent — for this, on Mr. Darwin's hypothesis, is essential to rapid de- 

 velopmental progress through the agency of natural selection. 



Under these circumstances we might certainl}^ expect to find some relics of these 

 earlier forms of man along with those of animals, which were presumably less 

 abundant. Negative evidence of this kind is not ver_v weighty, but still it has 

 some value. It has been suggested that as apes are mostly tropical, and anthropoid 

 apes are now confined almost exclusively to the vicinity of the equator, we should 

 expect the ancestral forms also to have inhabited these same localities— ^^'^est Africa 

 and the Malay Islands. But this objection is hardly valid, because existing anthro- 

 poid apes are wholly dependent on a perennial supply of easily accessible fniits, 

 %vhich is only found near the equator, while not only had the south of Europe an 

 almost tropical climate in Miocene times, but we must suppose even the earliest 

 ancestors of man to have been ten-estrial and omnivorous, since it must have taken 

 ages of slow modification to have produced the perfectly erect form, the short arms, 

 and the wholly non-prehensile foot, which so strongly differentiate man from 

 the arboreal apes. 



The conclusion which I think we must arrive at is, that if man has been deve- 

 loped from a common ancestor, with all existing apes, and hy no other agencies than 

 such as have affected their development, then he must have existed, in something ap- 

 proaching his present form, during the tertiary period — and not merely existed, 

 but predominated in numbers, wherever suitable conditions prevailed. If, then, 

 contmued researches in all parts of Europe and Asia fail to bring to light any 

 proofs of his presence, it will be at least a presumption that he came into existence 

 at a much later date, and by a much more rapid process of development. In that 

 case it will be a fixir argument that, just as he is in his mental and moral nature, 

 his capacities and aspii-ations, so infinitely raised above the brutes, so his origin 

 is due, in part, to distinct and higher agencies than such as have affected their 

 development. 



There is yet another line of inquii-y bearing upon this subject to which I wish to 

 call yoiu: attention. It is a somewhat curious fact that, while all modern writers 

 admit the great antiquity of man, most of them maintain the verv recent develop- 

 ment of his intellect, and will hardly contemplate the possibility of men equal in 

 mental capacity to ourselves having existed in prehistoric times. This question is 

 generally assumed to be settled by such relics as have been preserved of the manu- 

 factures of the older races showing a lower and lower state of the arts, by the 

 successive disappearance in early times of iron, bronze, and pottery, and by the 

 ruder forms of the older flint implements. The weakness of this argument has 

 been well shown by Mr. Albert Mott in his very original but little-lmowu pre- 

 sidential address to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpool in 1873. 

 He maintains that "om* most distant glimpses of the past are still of a world 

 peopled as now with men both civilized and savage,'' and "that we have often 

 entirely misread the past by supposing that the outward signs of civilization must 

 always be the same, and must be such as are found among om-selves." In support 

 of this view he adduces a variety of strilring facts and ingenious arguments, a few 

 of which I will briefly summarize. 



On one of the most remote islands of the Pacific — Easter Island — 2O0O miles 

 from South America, 2000 from the Marquesas, and more than 1000 from the 

 Gambler Islands, are found hundreds of gigantic stone images, now mostly in 

 ruins, often thirty or forty feet high, while some seem to have been nuich larger, 

 the crowns on their heads cut out of a red stone being sometimes ten feet in dia- 

 meter, while even the head and neck of one is said to have been twenty feet high *. 

 These once stood erect on extensive stone platforms; j'et the island has onlv an area 

 of about thirty square miles, or considerably less than Jersey. Now as one of the 

 smallest images eight feet high weighs four tons, the largest must weigh over a 

 hundred tons, if not much more ; and the existence of such vast works implies a 

 large population, abundance of food, and an established government. Yet how 

 could tliese coexist in a mere speck of land wholly cut off from the rest of the 



* Journ. of Roy..Gcog. See. 1870, pp. 177, 178. 



