2 86 The National Geographic Magazine 



evitably reduce itself either to a mass of 

 statistics, or to a catalogue of facts sum- 

 marized in every encyclopedia, even in 

 scores of school geographies — the facts 

 are literally, in the phrase of the auc- 

 tioneer's bill, "too numerous to men- 

 tion." Yet facts of object, place, and 

 agency too many for statement but form 

 a chaos which all scientists of recent 

 years concur in reducing — or at least 

 in seeking to reduce — to the order sug- 

 gested by the fourth nature-question, 

 Whence ? And this inquiry is answered 

 by a statement of the facts in terms of 

 genesis, growth, evolution, or (to use the 

 broadest term of all ) development. The 

 genesis of the primeval Asian is indeed 

 lost in the haze of prehistoric antiquity, 

 or even worse enshrouded in the mists 

 of myth-burdened tradition ; yet the 

 sciences of geology and archeology and 

 ethnology, on the one hand, and critical 

 history interpreted in their light on the 

 other hand, combine to illumine in some 

 degree the obscure problems of early 

 man. So, too, the chains of develop- 

 mental succession among the races and 

 peoples, tribes and nations, of the great 

 continent are regrettably incomplete ; 

 many links are lacking even from the 

 longest, while some are too short to give 

 good ground for confidence concerning 

 their invisible portions ; yet all are suf- 

 ficiently consistent in trend, and so far 

 accordant in direction with those found 

 in other lands and among other peoples, 

 as to render them worthy of tracing. 



A BIRTHPI.ACE OF MANKIND 



Most, or all, of the leading naturalists 

 and anthropologists of the day agree 

 fairly as to a probable birthplace of 

 Homo sapiens. Ernst Haeckel, the fore- 

 most German naturalist of his genera- 

 tion, assumed that the human species 

 originated in a now submerged region 

 between India and northern Africa, 

 known as lycmuria, the land of the lemur; 

 Brinton, recognizing the vestiges of 



mountain life in the morning of hu- 

 manity, looked to the upland zone 

 stretching from the Alps to the Hima- 

 layas, and especially to the western part 

 of this belt, as the home of man pri- 

 meval ; Keane finds suggestions of four 

 birthplaces for so many widely distinct 

 race-stocks, but locates all in the same 

 quarter of the globe ; while other stu- 

 dents, impressed by the evidence of low- 

 est savagery that primeval man must 

 have been both arborean and orarian — 

 both forest-dweller and shore-dweller — 

 and impressed also by the archeologic 

 evidences of antiquity in southern Asia, 

 have regarded the shores of Indian 

 Ocean with its afliuent bays as the re- 

 gion of earliest human development.' 

 Within a few years these inferences have 

 been strikingly corroborated by the dis- 

 covery of the long-mooted ' ' missing 

 link," Pithecanthropus eredns — upright 

 monkey-man — in late Pliocene deposits 

 of Java by Eugene Du Bois. This dis- 

 covery was of prime importance to the 

 scientific world, and especially to the 

 student of Asia, on various accounts ; 

 in the first place, the bones are more 

 nearly intermediate between those of 

 Homo and those of the higher subhu- 

 man anthropoids than any skeleton 

 known before ; in the second place, the 

 geographic position of the fossil serves 

 at once to verify previous inferences and 

 to locate more clearly than any (or in- 

 deed all) other evidence the home of a 

 human prototype ; while, in the third 

 place, the deposits in which the remains 

 were found afford the most trustworthy 

 record of the geologic age of a Homo- 

 like creature thus far obtained.* 



So the Pithecanthropits eredns of Du 

 Bois gives the starting point for the 

 tracing of human development on the. 

 Continent of continents ; the testimony 

 of the fossil is supported by other scien- 



*The most accessible and satisfactory ac- 

 count of this fossil may be found in the Smith- 

 sonian Report for 1898, pp. 445-459, pls.;i-iii, 

 figs. 1-4. 



II 



