644 wrecent Literature. [ August, 
in his acclimatization as he moved out in successive waves of 
migration from his birth-place. Our author then studies primitive 
man, the fossil human races, and finally discusses the physical and 
psychological characters of the present human races. From this 
sketch it will be seen in what a comprehensive way De Quatre- 
fages has viewed the subject. 
After endeavoring to prove the unity of the human species, a 
topic upon which there is now but little disagreement, he discusses 
Darwinism, and, while he accepts the doctrine of natural 
selection, claims that we have not yet discovered any vera causa 
of transmutation of species, though expressing his willingness 
to accept a theory of evolution when a good working one is dis- 
covered. He meanwhile strongly insists upon the fact that the 
early races of man have been modified during their migrations, 
and that the prehistoric races have been acted upon by climatic 
changes; thus far De Quatrefages is an evolutionist. His 
i of Huxley’s pithecoid man, 
are certainly weighty. 
As to the antiquity of man, De Quatrefages agrees with those 
who trace him back to miocene times, or to use his own, emphatic 
words, “Man was most certainly in existence during the 
quaternary epoch and during the transition age, to which the 
gravels of Saint Prest and the deposits of the Victoria cave be- 
ong. He has, in all probability, seen miocene times, and con- 
sequently the entire pliocene epoch” and, he adds, man may “ have 
been contemporaneous with the earliest mammalia, and go back 
as far as the secondary period.” ; 
While, simply for want of evidence, discarding the views of 
Darwin and Haeckel, as to the origin of man from some lower 
mammal, and indulging in no speculations of this sort, h2 still 
applies to man Darwin's theory of natural selection an the 
principle of the struggle for existence among the different races. 
After tracing briefly the history of the Aryan race, its orig!) 
on the southern slopes of the central Himalayas, in a region where 
the summer lasted only two months, and indicating the route this 
hardy race followed as it decended into Bokhara, and overrur 
Persia and Cabul before reaching the basin of the Indus, and 
finally reached the Ganges, and showing how this prepotent race 
overran the world until it has gradually become acclimatized et 
the poles to the tropics, he graphically compares the beginning Ht 
the human race to that of the far later Aryan race, in the follow- 
ing words :— 
“The human species must have made a beginning like the 
Aryans. Upon leaving their center of creation, it was by SiOW 
stages that the primitive colonists, ancestors of all existing tact 
marched forth to the conquest of the uninhabited world. — They 
thus accustomed themselves to the different conditions of existence 
