420 
TROPICAL NATURE 
VII 
protoplasm up to the highest development of the human 
intellect. Yet this is really what we have seen in the last 
sixteen years. Formerly difficulties were exaggerated, and it 
was asserted that we had not sufficient knowledge to venture 
on any generalisations on the subject, Now difficulties are set 
aside, and it is held that our theories are so well established 
and so far-reaching that they explain and comprehend all 
nature. If is not long ago (as I have already reminded 
you) since facts were contemptuously ignored, because they 
favoured our now popular views; at the present day it 
seems to me that facts which oppose them hardly receive 
due consideration. And as opposition is the best incentive 
to progress, and it is not well even for the best theories to 
have it all their own way, I propose to direct your attention 
to a few such facts, and to the conclusions that seem fairly 
deducible from them. 
Indications of Man’s Extreme Antiquity 
It is a curious circumstance that, notwithstanding the 
attention that has been directed to the subject in every part 
of the world, and the numerous excavations connected with 
railways and mines, which have offered such facilities for 
geological discovery, no advance whatever has been made for 
a considerable number of years in detecting the time or mode 
of man’s origin. The Palaeolithic flint weapons first dis- 
covered in the north of France more than thirty years ago 
are still the oldest undisputed proofs of man’s existence; 
and amid the countless relics of a former world that have 
been brought to light, no evidence of any one of the links 
that must have connected man with the lower animals has 
yet appeared. 
It is, indeed, well known that negative evidence in 
geology is of very slender value; and this is, no doubt, 
generally the case. The circumstances here are, however, 
peculiar, for many converging lines of evidence show that, 
on the theory of development by the same laws which have 
determined the development of the lower animals, man must 
be immensely older than any traces of him yet discovered. 
As this is a point of great interest we must devote a few 
moments to its consideration. 
