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Address of A. R. Wallace at the Glasgow Meeting. 877 
ences are so numerous and so diverse that on the theory of eyvo- 
lution the ancestral form which ultimately developed into man 
must have diverged from the common stock whence all these 
p to man branched off at a still earlier peri And these 
early forms, being the initiation of a far higher type, and hav- 
ing to develop by natural selection into so specialized and 
altogether distinct a creature as man, must have risen at a very 
early period into the position of a dominant race, and spread in 
dense waves of population over all suitable portions of the 
great continent-—for this, on Mr. Darwin’s hypothesis, is essen- 
tial to rapid developmental progress through the agency of 
natural selection. 
almost tropical climate in Miocene times, but we must — 
an 
*mnivorous, since it must have taken ages of slow modification 
to have produced the perfectly erect form, the short arms, an 
the who ly non-prehensile foot, which so strongly differentiate 
man from the apes. ; 
€ conclusion which I think we must arrive at is, that if 
man has been developed from a common ancestor, with all ex- 
ace apes, and by no other agencies than such as have affected 
cor development, then he must have existed in something ap- 
Proaching his spun form, during the tertiary period—and not 
‘ of Europe and Asia fail to bring to light any proofs of 
heey it will be at least a presumption that he came into 
