26 
PROOFS OF EVOLUTION. 
as to foods, and favoring localities. This would 
induce some sort of reflection, and implant in the 
mind at least a nebulous train of reason and 
ordered thought. This would give the brain more 
and better work to do, and the doing would 
increase its size, quality, and convolutions. 
Why should advance stop at this point ? Why 
should not the same progressive change and 
upward tendency still go on ? Is the change from 
the mute little fish to a roaring Saurian less 
marvelous than the advance from highest mammal 
then existing to the earliest savage man, without 
speech, or language, and feeding on whatever prey 
the forest offered, including his own kind ? Doubt¬ 
less man lived thousands of years before he 
acquired what we would now call language. 
Nevertheless, his earliest cries and noises were the 
beginnings of connected speech; though no more 
intelligible than the chattering of apes. 
If we could go back to this lowest conceivable 
savage, what should we find ? Probably this: 
The anthropoid ape and the man-animal not quite 
out of sight of each other, but evolving on 
divergent roads from a common ancestor. If we 
could have stood near the diverging point, it would 
