DARWINISM AND EVOLUTION. 29 



It has been well said by Prof. Dawkins that " if man were upon 

 " the earth in the Meiocene age, it is incredible that he should not 

 " have become something else in the long lapse of ages and during 

 " the changes in the conditions of life by which all the Meiocene 

 "land mammalia have been so profoundly affected that they 

 " have been either exterminated, or have assumed new forms. 

 "It is impossible to believe that man should have been an 

 " exception to the law of change to which all the higher 

 " mammalia have been subjected since the Eocene age." 



In other words, in tracing back our descent, when we come to 

 Meiocene times, we must expect to find our ancestors no longer 

 exactly human. So that the exceedingly rude flints found in 

 Mid-meiocene strata by the Abbe Bourgeois, and figured by Prof. 

 Gaudry, were, if truly belonging to this horizon, the workmanship 

 of a prehuman archseolithic race, from which man has been 

 evolved. At present no traces of this form have been discovered, 

 just as we have absolutely none of our palaeolithic ancestors, who 

 left their flint implements in the valley of the Thames in asso- 

 ciation with the bones of tropical animals ; and just as we have 

 absolutely none of the men who have left the hills about Rochdale 

 strewn with neolithic tools and chippings. 



It appears, however, that in the argillaceous sandstones of 

 Nevada, the tracks of several species of Pleiocene mammalia are 

 accompanied by those of a biped resembling man. 



It has been said that the closer the structural resemblance 

 between man and apes, the more striking becomes man's mental 

 and intellectual superiority, which would seem therefore to be due 

 to"a divine endowment. 



But there are many examples of the fact that psychical develop- 

 ment does not coincide with morphological likeness ; that mind 

 and form do not always vary concomitantly. Anatomically there 

 is very little difference between a bee and a fly, or between an ant 

 and a beetle ; but how marvellous is the contrast between their 

 mental powers, and how much more is one animal than the other 

 able to bend external forces to its own use and advantage. 



Before passing on to consider sensation and cerebration, it may 

 be well to point out that one of the characteristics of a true theory 

 is that it enables us to explain a number of difficulties otherwise 

 inexplicable. Darwinism, for instance, solves all problems re- 

 specting the distribution of animal and vegetable life upon the 

 islands and continents of the globe. Darwinism supplies the 

 reason why, in their own habitats, some creatures are quickly 

 displaced and supplanted by foreign ones with which they are 

 brought into competition ; — as the Australian flora and fauna 

 disappear before plants and quadrupeds imported from Europe, 

 and as negroid races vanish before the white man. 



Above all, it is only Darwinism that can account satisfactorily for 



