FOSSIL MEN. 297 



investigations of a future time. This applies also to those 

 more special questions of human phylogeny at which it 

 is desirable before concluding to take a cursory glance, 

 namely, the question of the time and place of the origin of 

 the human race, as also of the different species and races 

 into which it has differentiated. 



In the first place, the period of the earth's history, within 

 which the slow and gradual transmutation of the most 

 man-like apes into the most ape-like men took place, can of 

 course not be determined by years, nor even by centuries. 

 This much can, however, with full assurance be maintained, 

 for reasons given in the last chapter, that Man is derived 

 from Placental animals. Now, as fossil remains of these 

 Placentalia are found only in the tertiary rocks, the 

 human race can at the earliest have developed only within 

 the Tertiary period out of perfected man-like apes. What 

 seems most probable is that this most important process in 

 the history of terrestrial creation occurred towards the end 

 of the Tertiary period, that is in the Pliocene, perhaps even 

 in the Miocene period, but possibly also not until the 

 beginning of the Diluvial period. At all events Man, as 

 such, lived in central Europe as early as the Diluvial period, 

 contemporaneously with many large, long since extinct 

 mammals, especially with the diluvial elephant, or mammoth 

 (Elephas primigenius), the wooUy -haired rhinoceros (Rhino- 

 ceros tichorrhinus), the giant deer (Cervus euryceros), the 

 cave bear (Ursus spelseus), the cave hysena (Hysena spelsea). 

 the cave lion (Felis spelseus), etc. The results brought to 

 light by recent geology and archaeology as to these fossil 

 men and their animal contemporaries of the diluvial period, 

 are of the greatest interest. But as a closer examination of 



