1036 HISTORICAL GEOLOGY. 



It is of no avail to speak of chance variations. The iise of the word 

 chance indicates personal ignorance. Chance has no place in nature's laws, 

 and can have none in nature-science. 



Man's origin has thus far no sufficient explanation from science. His 

 close relations in structure to the Man- Apes are unquestionable. They have 

 the same number of bones with two exceptions, and the bones are the 

 same in kind and structure. The muscles are mostly the same. Both carry 

 their young in their arms. The affiliations strongly suggest community of 

 descent. But the divergencies mentioned on page 1018, especially the cases 

 of degeneracy in Man's structure, exhibited in his palmigrade feet and the 

 primitive character of his teeth, allying him in these respects to the Lower 

 Eocene forms, are admitted proof that he has not descended from any 

 existing type of Ape. In addition, Man's erect posture makes the gap a 

 very broad one. The brute, the Ape included, has powerful muscles in the 

 back of the neck to carry the head in its horizontal position, while Man has 

 no such muscles, as any one of the species can prove by crawling for a 

 while on " all fours." Beyond this, the great size of the brain, his eminent 

 intellectual and moral qualities, his voice and speech, give him sole title to 

 the position at the head of the Kingdoms of Life. In this high position, 

 he is able to use Nature as his work-mate, his companion, and his educator, 

 and to find perpetual delight in her harmonies and her revelations. 



The search for " missing links " has been carried forward with deep 

 interest during recent years. But although fossil skeletons have been found 

 among the remains of Pleistocene Mammals in Europe and America none 

 show any indication of departure from the erect posture, or have smaller 

 brain cavity than occurs among existing races of Men. The most probable 

 regions for the discovery of precursor forms are those of Africa and the 

 East Indies. Already, since these closing pages were first in type, the 

 report has come of the discovery, in the Pleistocene deposits of Java, of an 

 imperfect cranium, a femur bearing evidence of prolonged disease, and a molar 

 tooth, which the describer, E. Dubois, has named Pithecanthropus erectus, 

 placing it between the Man- Apes and Man. Others make the remains those 

 of a low-grade Man, or of an idiot. Since Man's structural relations are, in 

 several respects, closest with the precursors of the Quadrumana (p. 1017), his 

 derivation f rora any known type of Man-Ape has been pronounced impossible. 



Whatever the results of further search, we may feel assured, in accord 

 with Wallace, who shares with Darwin in the authorship of the theory of 

 Natural Selection, that the intervention of a Power above Nature was at the 

 basis of Man's development. Believing that Nature exists through the will 

 and ever-acting power of the Divine Being, and that all its great truths, its 

 "beauties, its harmonies, are manifestations of His wisdom and power, or, in 

 the words nearly of Wallace, that the whole Universe is not merely depen- 

 dent on, but actually is, the Will of one Supreme Intelligence, Nature, with 

 Man as its culminant species, is no longer a mystery. 



