1 878.] 
Doctrine of Development . 465 
earlier forms of man in company with those of other animals 
which were, ex hypothesis less abundant ? We reply that not 
one-hundredth part of what is now dry land has hitherto 
been satisfactorily explored. Possibly the extinCt anthro- 
poids may have mainly inhabited some of the regions which 
existed where now there roll wide, though shallow, seas. 
Living, as we might expeCt, among low-land tropical foreets, 
their bodies, when dead, would be fully exposed to all the 
destructive agencies of Nature. Perhaps their habits were 
specially unfavourable to the preservation and fossilisation 
of their remains. Perhaps cannibalism was widely preva- 
lent in those days. The order Primates is hitherto but 
sparingly represented among the fossil Mammalia. Nay, 
leaving the geological ages out of the question, and coming 
down the stream of time to within historical days, let us 
take some country which we know to have been densely 
peopled from four thousand to three thousand years ago, 
and ask how many human remains of such dates could be 
there discovered? We naturally except Egypt, and any 
other country where it was customary to embalm the dead. 
Is there some cause why the skeletons of the anthropoids 
and of man are more perishable than those of the lower 
forms of vertebrate life ? Some writers have suggested that 
as the Quadrumana are now almost exclusively tropical, and 
the anthropoid species even equatorial, we should look for 
the earliest ancestors of man in such regions as the Malay 
Islands or Western Africa. To this Mr. Wallace replies 
that existing anthropoid apes are confined to equatorial 
regions because there only can a perennial supply of fruits 
suitable for their nourishment be found. But as in the 
Miocene epoch Southern Europe possessed an almost tro- 
pical climate, this restriction as to locality might then not 
have existed. Still experience shows us that a species is 
not necessarily found wherever conditions suitable for its 
existence are present. 
We must, however, admit that if further geological ex- 
ploration fails to place in our hands a greater number of 
human remains from the pre-historic ages, and especially 
anthropoid forms lower than the existing races of man, 
though higher than any existing apes, the views now domi- 
nant in scientific circles concerning the origin and early 
history of our race will stand in need of a careful revision. 
We shall apparently have to admit that man, however 
ancient, can scarcely have been formed by that slow and 
uniform process of development which must result from the 
operation of Natural Selection. It will be, as Mr. Wallace 
VOL. VIII. (n.s.) 2 H 
