340 APPENDIX A 



interesting writing, and the gift of generalization. Ameghino 

 rendered marked services to paleontology. But he generalized 

 with complete recklessness from the slenderest data; and even 

 these data he often completely misunderstood or misinterpreted. 

 His favourite thesis included the origin of mammalian life and of 

 man himself in southernmost South America, with, as incidents, 

 the belief that the mammalian-bearing strata of South America 

 were of much greater age than the strata with corresponding 

 remains elsewhere; that in South America various species and 

 genera of men existed in tertiary times, some of them at least as 

 advanced as fairly well advanced modern savages ; that there 

 existed various land bridges between South America and other 

 southern continents, including Africa ; and that the ancestral types 

 of modern mammals and of man himself wandered across one of 

 these bridges to the old world, and that thence their remote 

 descendants, after ages of time, returned to the new. In addition 

 to valuable investigations of fossil-bearing beds in the Argentine, 

 he made some excellent general suggestions, such as that the 

 pithecoid apes, like the baboons, do not stand in the line of man's 

 ancestral stem but represent a divergence from it away from 

 humanity and toward a retrogressive bestialization. But of his 

 main theses he proves none, and what evidence we have tells 

 against them. At the Museum of La Plata I found that the 

 authorities were practically a unit in regarding his remains of 

 tertiary men and proto-men as being either the remains of tertiary 

 American monkeys or of American Indians from strata that were 

 long post-tertiary. The extraordinary discovery, due to that 

 eminent scientist and public servant Doctor Moreno, of the remains 

 of man associated with the remains of the great extinct South 

 American fauna, of the mylodon, of a giant ungulate, of a huge 

 cat like the lion, and of an extraordinary aberrant horse (of a wholly 

 different genus from the modern horse) conclusively shows that in 

 its later stages the South American fauna consisted largely of types 

 that elsewhere had already disappeared and that these types per- 

 sisted into what was geologically a very recent period only some 

 tens of thousands of years ago, when savage man of practically 

 a modern type had already appeared in South America. The 

 evidence we have, so far as it goes, tends to show that the South 



