VIII 
TEE DEVELOPMENT OF HUMAN RACES 
181 
to suppose that man’s distribution over the surface of the 
earth was less universal than at present. 
Besides, Europe was in a great measure submerged during 
the tertiary epoch ; and though its scattered islands may have 
been uninhabited by man, it by no means follows that he did 
not at the same time exist in warm or tropical continents. If 
geologists can point out to us the most extensive land in the 
warmer regions of the earth, which has not been submerged 
since Eocene or Miocene times, it is there that we may expect 
to find some traces of the very early progenitors of man. It 
is there that we may trace back the gradually decreasing 
brain of former races, till we come to a time when the body 
also begins materially to differ. Then we shall have reached 
the starting-point of the human family. Before that period 
he had not mind enough to preserve his body from change, 
and would, therefore, have been subject to the same com- 
paratively rapid modifications of form as the other mammalia. 
Their Bearing on the Dignity and Supremacy of Man 
If the views I have here endeavoured to sustain have any 
foundation, they give us a new argument for placing man 
apart, as not only the head and culminating point of the grand 
series of organic nature, but as in some degree a new and dis- 
tinct order of being. From those infinitely remote ages, when 
the first rudiments of organic life appeared upon the earth, 
every plant and every animal has been subject to one great 
law of physical change. As the earth has gone through its 
grand cycles of geological, climatal, and organic progress, 
every form of life has been subject to its irresistible action, 
and has been continually but imperceptibly moulded into 
such new shapes as would preserve their harmony with the 
ever-changing universe. No living thing could escape this 
law of its being ; none (except, perhaps, the simplest and most 
rudimentary organisms) could remain unchanged and live, 
amid the universal change around it. 
At length, however, there came into existence a being in 
whom that subtle force we term mind , became of greater 
importance than his mere bodily structure. Though with a 
naked and unprotected body, this gave him clothing against 
the varying inclemencies of the seasons. Though unable to 
