ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 



289 



having to develop by natural selection into so specialized 

 and altogether distinct a creature as man, must have 

 risen at a very -early period into the position of a 

 dominant race, and spread in dense waves of popula- 

 tion over all suitable portions of the great continent — 

 for this, on Mr. Darwin's hypothesis, is essential to 

 developmental progress through the agency of natural 

 selection. 



Under these circumstances we might certainly expect 

 to find some relics of these earlier forms of man along 

 with those of animals, which were presumably less 

 abundant. Negative evidence of this kind is not very 

 weighty, but still it has some value. It has been sug- 

 gested that as apes are mostly tropical, and anthropoid 

 apes are now confined almost exclusively to the vicinity 

 of the equator, we should expect the ancestral forms of 

 man to have inhabited these same localities — West Africa 

 and the Malay Islands. But this objection is hardly 

 valid, because existing anthropoid apes are wholly de- 

 pendent on a perennial supply of easily accessible fruits, 

 which is only found near the equator ; while not only 

 had the south of Europe an almost tropical climate in 

 Miocene times, but we must suppose even the earliest 

 ancestors of man to have been terrestrial and omnivorous, 

 since it must have taken ages of slow modification to 

 have produced the perfectly erect form, the short arms, 

 and the wholly non-prehensile foot,^ which so strongly 

 difierentiate man from the arboreal apes. 



1 The common statement of travellers as to savages having great prehensile 

 power in the toes, has been adopted by some naturalists as indicating an ap- 

 proach to the apes. But this notion is founded on a complete misconception. 

 Savages pick up objects with their feet, it is true, but always by a lateral 

 motion of the toes, which we should equally possess if we never wore shoes or 



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