HUMAN HIEROGLYPHICS. 389 



The archives of the earth also offer us their 

 testimony : the graves give up their dead, and 

 teach us that man existed many thousand years ago, 

 in company with monstrous animals that have long 

 since passed away ; and that those men were savages, 

 using weapons and implements of stone, yet possessing 

 even then a taste for ornament and art, wearing shell 

 bracelets, and drawing rude figures upon horns and 

 stones. The manners and ideas of such early tribes 

 can best be inferred by a study of existing savages. 

 The missionary who resides among such races as the 

 Bushmen of Africa or the Botocudos of Brazil, may be 

 said to live in pre-historic times. 



But as regards the origin of man, we have only 

 one document to which we can refer; and that is 

 the body of man himself. There, in unmistakeable 

 characters, are inscribed the annals of his early life. 

 These hieroglyphics are not to be fully deciphered 

 without a special preparation for the task : the alpha- 

 bet of anatomy must first be mastered, and the 

 student must be expert in the language of all living 

 and fossil forms. One fact, however, can be sub- 

 mitted to the uninitiated eye, and it will be sufficient 

 for the purpose. Look at a skeleton and you will 

 see a little bone curled downwards between the legs, 

 as if trying to hide itself away. That bone is a relic 

 of pre-human days, and announces plainly whence our 

 bodies come. We are all of us naked under our 

 clothes, and we are all of us tailed under our skins. 

 But when we descend to the man-like apes, we find that, 

 with them as with us, the tail is effete and in disuse ; 

 and so we follow it downwards and downwards 

 until we discover it in all its glory in the body 

 of the fish ; being there present, not as a relic or rudi- 



