LIFE OF TERTIAKY TERIOD 265 



adequately recognised, because each new writer has Weu afraid 

 to incur the stigma of credulity, and therefore usually limited 

 himself to such facts as he had himself observed, or could quote 

 from his best-known contemporaries. On the other hand, the 

 old idea that man was the latest product of nature (or of 

 evolution) still makes itself felt in the attempt to escape from 

 any evidence proving man's coexistence with such extinct 

 species as would imply greater antiquity. In the chapter on 

 The Antiquity of Man in l^orth America (in my Xatural 

 Selection and Tropical !N'ature) I have given numerous ex- 

 amples of both these states of mind. And what makes them 

 so specially unreasonable is, that all evolutionists are satis- 

 fied that the common ancestor of man and the anthropoid apes 

 must date back to the Miocene, if not to the Eocene period ; 

 so that the real mystery is, not that the works or the remains 

 of ancestral man are found throughout the Pleistocene period, 

 but that they are not also found throughout the Pliocene, and 

 also in some Miocene deposits. There is not, as often as- 

 sumed, one " missing link " to be discovered, but at least a 

 score such links, adequately to fill the gap between man and 

 apes ; and their non-discovery is now^ one of the strongest 

 proofs of the imperfection of the geological record. 



When we find, as we do, that, with the one exception of 

 Australia, proofs of man's coexistence with all the great ex- 

 tinct Pleistocene Mammalia are sufiiciently clear, while that 

 the Australians are equally ancient is proved by their form- 

 ing so well-marked and unique a race, the fact that man should 

 every^vhere have helped to exterminate the various hugo 

 quadrupeds, whose flesh would be a highly valued food, al- 

 most becomes a certainty. The following passage from one 

 of our best authorities, Mr. R. Lydekker, F.K.S., puts the 

 w^hole case in a very clear light, though he does not definitely 

 accept the conclusion whicli I hold to be now well established. 

 He says: 



" From the northern half of the Old World have disappeared the 

 mammoth, the elasmothere (a very peculiar, huge rhinoceros, whose 



