THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. 530 
the piously refers it to the operation of the Creator. He thinks he can see traces 
of such evolution in the carnivorous animals, as derived from marsupials, and in 
the antelope and deer tribe, more especially in the development of horn and antler ; 
-and he traces the horse through a supposed ancestry of hipparia, etc., differing, 
however, from English and American evolutionists in making the Faleotherium 
the initial link. This is, however, a matter of taste, as these genealogies may 
usually be traced with equal probability or improbability through any one of half 
a dozen lines. But in the case of some groups of animals, and these of the high- 
est importance, he freely admits that derivation is at fault. The elephants and 
their allies the deinotheres and mastodons, for example, appear all at once in the 
Miocene period and in many countries, and they only dwindle in magnitude and 
mumbers as they approach the modern. Gaudry frankly says: ‘‘ D’ot sont-ils 
venus, de quels quadrupédes ont-ils été dérivés? Nous lignorons encore.” The 
edentates, the rodents, the bats, the manatees are equally mysterious, and so are 
the cetaceans, those great mammalian monsters of the deep, which leap into ex- 
astence in grand and highly developed forms in the Eocene, and which surely 
should have left some trace of their previous development in the sea. ‘‘ We 
have,’’ says Gaudry, ‘‘ questioned these strange and gigantic sovereigns of the 
Tertiary oceans as to their progenitors, but they leave us without reply,” and he 
goes on to refer to several things in connection with their habitat, their reproduc- 
tion, and their dentition or want of it, which make their sudden appearance still 
more inscrutable. It is refreshing to find a naturalist who, while honestly and 
even enthusiastically seeking to establish the derivation of animals, gives due 
prominence to the facts which, in the present state of knowledge at least, refuse “ 
to be explained by his theory. The reader may note here that the appearance 
of man fully developed in the Modern period is parallel with that of the elephan- 
‘tine animals in the Miocene and the whales in the Eocene, as well as with a vast 
multitude of other cases which meet the paleontologists in every direction. 
In the world of plants, Sarporta has a strangely different story to tell, though 
ats general plan evidently harmonizes with the history of mammalian life. If we 
keep out of view the few species of small marsupials that exist in the Mesozoic period, 
mammalian life in all its grandeur comes into existence at a bound in the Eocene. 
But it had been preceded for at least one great geological period by a vegetation 
similar to that now living. It can scarcely be questioned that the vegetation of 
the older geological periods, however rank and abundant, was not well suited to 
‘sustain the higher herbivorous animals. Accordingly, no such animals are known 
an these periods. But in the cretaceous age we find in the lower beds of that 
‘series some coniferous plants of living genera, and in the upper cretaceous modern 
generic forms come in, both in Europe and America, in great force. We have 
magnolias, oaks, beeches, ivies, ginsengs, plane-trees, poplars, palms, and a host 
of familiar forms, and some of these so closely resembling existing species that it 
‘scarcely requires the eyes of an evolutionist to see in them the ancestors of our 
modern trees. Thus an ample and long-continued preparation was made not 
IV—36 
