312 The Antiquity of Mankind. [May, 
in point of time brings us also a step nearer in point of 
development, as we now find not merely orders and families, 
but genera which still exist. We pass on again to the 
Pleiocene, and here we have even living species, though few 
in number, and accompanied by a majority of extindt spe- 
cies. In the Pleistocene, again, we find living species now 
no longer few, but numerous, whilst the proportion of ex- 
tinct species has decreased. In the Prehistoric we see— as 
far as Europe is concerned — living species accompanied by 
one only extindt form. 
These remarks and this diagram are. not given by the 
author as a biological confession of faith ; they are the 
summary of certain phenomena which bear closely upon the 
question at issue. Was man found in Britain or in the 
world in the Eocene epoch ? We look over the mammalian 
remains of those days, and we certainly find members of 
the order Primates, to which man belongs; but they are 
exclusively lemurs, members of the order lowest in their 
strudture, and most remote from man and from the anthro- 
poid apes. None of them, further, belong to any existing 
genus. The lemurs of those days were still closely linked 
to the Ungulates, or hoofed quadrupeds, and the beasts of 
prey bear a marsupial stamp. Surely, then, in the absence 
of any diredt trace of man or of his works, we are war- 
ranted in concluding, with the author, that in such a fauna 
man could find no place. To seek for so highly specialised 
a being as man “ where no now living genus of placental 
mammal was present would be an idle and hopeless quest.” 
We come next to the Meiocene Age, Mr. Dawkins 
describes the climate, the fauna, and the flora, and admits 
that the climate was favourable and that food was most 
abundant. Further, representatives of the higher apes were 
now present in Central and Southern Europe. Still the 
Meiocene fauna affords not even a single instance of any 
land mammal which still survives. Is it, then, probable 
that man, “ the most highly specialised of all creatures, 
had his place in a fauna which is conspicuous by the absence 
of all the Mammalia now associated with him ?” “ If,” 
the author adds, “ we accept the evidence advanced in 
favour of Meiocene man, it is incredible that he alone, of 
all the Mammalia living in those times in Europe, should 
not have perished or changed into some other form in the 
long lapse of ages during which many Meiocene genera and 
all the Meiocene species have become extindt. Those 
who believe in the dodtrine of Evolution will see the full 
force of this argument against the presence of man in the 
