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that existence by virtue of natural selection. Man must have 
had human proportions of mind before he could afford to lose 
bestial proportions of body.” In this line of argument we 
have a weapon which yields a fatal thrust to the theory of 
natural selection. 
Secondly . The most ancient remains of man, as a matter 
of fact, manifest no approximation to our simious ancestors. 
Such as man now is, such he seems always to have been. 
The fossil man of Mentone, for example, tells of a man six 
feet high and of vast muscular powers. His skull might 
have contained the brain of a Darwin. Such a man, if he 
were to rise up again among us, might, of course, be a savage, 
but he would be a noble savage, with all our capacity for 
culture, and with no more affinity to an ape than any one 
present. Professor Dawson has shown in a remarkable way 
that, whilst on the one hand no new species of mammals have 
been introduced since the post-glacial period, there still exist 
among us 57 distinct species that inhabited Europe in that 
post-glacial period. They exist unchanged, and not one can 
be shown to have been modified into a new form, though 
some of them have been obliged, by changes of temperature 
and other conditions, to remove into distant and now widely 
separated regions. Whatever the period that has elapsed 
since the glacial age, whatever the duration of man on the 
earth, there have been these 57 lines of species — a series of 
lines manifesting no tendency, however far back they may be 
traced, to converge, but strictly parallel throughout. What 
conclusions can be drawn from such a fact but one utterly 
fatal to the doctrine of development ? It is facts like this that 
led Huxley to confess that the first traces of the primordial 
stock whence man has proceeded need no longer be sought by 
those who entertain any form of the doctrine of progressive 
development in the newest tertiaries ; and, says he, they may 
be looked for in an epoch more distant from the age of those 
tertiaries than that is from us. For that search we may leave 
our Darwinian friends without any misgivings. 
And, thirdly , it has been strikingly shown by Mr. Ackland 
that the system breaks down when tested by the law of pro- 
babilities. “In order that any variation may be perpetuated 
and increased, the pairing of similarly affected individuals 
is necessary, and this must be repeated again and again, and 
with every repetition of the process the probabilities against 
it would rapidly increase. Thus, supposing that in the first 
generation the proportion of favourable conditions were such 
that of those animals that paired there were four of each sex 
that had them to three that wanted them, the chances that any 
