THE LOST FOSSILS. 409 



ture of the past ? In a rainless country such as Egypt, 

 which is a museum of Nature, a monumental land, not 

 only painted and engraven records, hut even paper 

 scrolls of an immense antiquity have heen preserved. 

 But if we add to these the rock inscriptions, the 

 printed bricks, and inscribed cylinders of Western 

 Asia, how scanty and fortuitous are the remains ! Let 

 us now remember that fossils cannot be copied ; once 

 destroyed, they are for ever lost. Is it wonderful, 

 therefore, that so few should be left ? Fires greater 

 than those of Alexandria and Constantinople are ever 

 burning beneath our feet ; at this very moment a pre- 

 cious library may be in flames. Yet that is not the 

 worst. The action of air and water is fatal to the 

 archives of nature, which it is not part of nature's 

 plan to preserve for our instruction. Those animals 

 which have neither bones nor shells are at once 

 destroyed ; and those which possess a solid framework 

 are only preserved under special and exceptional con- 

 ditions. The marvel is not that we find so little, but 

 that we find so much. The development of man from 

 the lower animals is now an authenticated fact. We 

 believe, therefore, that connecting links between man 

 and some ape-like animal existed for the same reason 

 that we believe the second decade of Livy existed. It 

 is not impossible that the missing books of Livy may 

 be discovered at some future day beneath the Italian 

 soil. It is not impossible that forms intermediate be- 

 tween man and his ape-like ancestors may be dis- 

 covered in the unexplored strata of equatorial Africa, 

 or the Indian Archipelago. But either event is im- 

 probable in the extreme ; and the existence of such 

 intermediate forms will be admitted by the historians 

 of the next generation, whether they are found or not. 



