324 THE ACTION OF NATURAL 
out to us the most extensive land in the warmer regions 
of the earth, which has not been submerged since 
Eocene or Miocene times, it is there that we may ex- 
pect to find some traces of the very early progenitors of 
man. It is there that we may trace back the gradually 
decreasing brain of former races, till we come to a time 
when the body also begins materially to differ. Then 
we shall have reached the starting point of the human 
family. Before that period, he had not mind enough 
to preserve his body from change, and would, there- 
fore, have been subject to the same comparatively rapid 
modifications of form as the other mammalia. 
Their Bearing on the Dignity and Supremacy of Man. 
If the views I have here endeavoured to sustain 
have any foundation, they give us a new argument for 
placing man apart, as not only the head and culmi- 
nating point of the grand series of organic nature, but 
as in some degree a new and distinct order of being. 
From those infinitely remote ages, when the first rudi- 
ments of organic life appeared upon the earth, every 
plant, and every animal has been subject to one great 
law of physical change. As the earth has gone through 
its grand cycles of geological, climatal, and organic 
progress, every form of life has been subject to its 
irresistible action, and has been continually, but imper- 
ceptibly moulded into such new shapes as would pre- 
serve their harmony with the ever-changing universe. 
No living thing could escape this law of its being ; 
none (except, perhaps, the simplest and most rudi- 
