The Evolution op Man 95 



The direct or fossil evidence is therefore scanty, and 

 justifies the ordinary text-book of science in almost 

 entirely ignoring the question. There is, however, 

 hardly a zoologist in the world to-day who questions the 

 evolution of man from an early lemur-like ancestor, and 

 we may attempt to piece together their speculations in 

 order to get some idea of that evolution. It Is clear 

 that the lemurs had a wide distribution in the Old 

 World early in the Tertiary epoch. They have sufficient 

 traces of their marsupial origin to explain whence they 

 came, and the scattered localities in which their remains 

 occur tell us something of what happened. Africa (or 

 the Afro-Asian continent that still existed in part) was 

 apparently their first home. They wandered northward 

 over Europe, and westward across the remainder of the 

 Brazil-African continent to America (or over the 

 northern continent). The Brazil-African continent dis- 

 appeared early in the Tertiary, and the apes — the suc- 

 cessors of the lemurs — developed separately in the Old 

 and New Worlds into the Catarrhine (narrow-nosed) and 

 Platyrrhine (broad - nosed) apes respectively. The 

 lemurs themselves, small and timid creatures, were 

 extinguished in Europe and America. They are found 

 to-day only in Madagascar, the Abyssinian region of 

 Africa, and the islands to the south of Asia — a circum- 

 stance that points strikingly to the lost Afro-Asian 

 continent. 



One particular stem of the lemurs was meantime out- 

 stripping its fellows in intelligence and other features. 

 If we knew where this took place we might be able to 

 trace the special stimuli in the environment that caused 

 this particular development. At present the evidence, 

 or lack of evidence, points to the land that foundered in 

 the Indian Ocean sometime in the Tertiary epoch. The 

 few remains we have of anthropoid apes belong to 



