366 
earth’s surface are concerned, which have received anything like 
thorough investigation, the earliest races of man were altogether 
uncivilized. The fact that rude though spirited drawings of the 
reindeer, and the mammoth, have been found in the Dordogne caves 
in the south of France, unquestionably the productions of palaeo- 
lithic men, is not inconsistent with the belief in their uncivilized 
condition, for the curious fact has recently been noticed by 
Professor Fritsch that the Bushmen, who are probably the 
most degraded of mankind, have a considerable amount of artistic 
skill, including a knowledge of perspective. 
Carrying our thoughts still further backward, we are confronted 
with the question of the possible ancestry of primeval man. When 
Mr. Darwin published in 1859 the ‘ Origin of Species,’ although 
he only incidentally alluded to the subject, it was felt and urged 
by objectors to the theory of evolution, that were its truth 
established, as far as the various lower forms of animal and 
vegetable life were concerned, it would be next to impossible to 
suppose that the case of man was an exception to the rule, and it 
was to this belief that the violent opposition which the Darwinian 
theory encountered may probably be assigned. It is difficult, I 
think, to withstand the force of this argument. So long as the 
views of creation which were formerly in vogue were held to apply, 
not only to organic life, but to the earth itself, and even to the 
different bodies of the solar system, so long could the belief that 
man sprung suddenly into existence at the word of the Creator be 
logically held, but now that Science has given us its grand con- 
ception of the Beign of Law — which indeed does not supersede 
the idea of a Supreme Being, but to a large proportion of scientific 
thinkers necessitates that belief — now that we are able to under- 
stand much of the way in which creation lias been carried on, 
learning, for example, from geology, what have certainly been 
the processes by which the surface of the earth has acquired its 
present condition, and from other branches of physical science 
what lias probably been the genesis of the heavenly bodies ; now 
that the idea of evolution is not only shown to be true in physical, 
but to be also an integral part even of mental and moral science, in 
