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Show 200 THE DESCENT OF MAN. PART I. At the period and place, whenever and wherever it may have been, when man first lost his hairy covering, he probably inhabited a bot country; and this would have been favourable for a frugiferous diet, on which, judging from analogy, be subsisted. We are far from knowing how long ago it was when man first diverged from the Catarhine stock; but this may have occurred at an epoch as remote as the Eocene period ; for the higher apes had diverged from the lower apes as early as the Upper Miocene period, as shewn by the existence of the Dryopitbecns. vVe are also quite ignorant at how rapid a rate organisms, whether high or low in the scale, may under favourable circumstances be modified: we know, however, that some have retained the same form during an enormous lapse of time. From what we see going on under domestication, we learn that within the same period some of the co-descendants of the same species may be not at all changed, some a little, and some greatly changed. Thus it may have been with man, who has undergone a great amount of modification in certain characters in comparison with the higher apes. The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the belief that man is descended from some lower form; but this objecti~n will not appear of much weight to those who, convinced by general reasons, believe in the general principle of evolution. Breaks incessantly occur in all parts of the series, some being wide, sharp and defined, others less so in various degrees ; as between the orang and its nearest allies-between the Tarsius and the other Lemuridre-between the elephant and in a more striking manner between the Ornithorbynchus or CII.A.P. VI. . AFFINITIES AND GENEALOGY. 201 Echidna, and other mammals. But all these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have become extinct. At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races <>f man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the ~arne time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schuaffhausen has remarked/6 will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider for it will intervene between man in a more civilised s~ate, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. With respect to the absence of fossil remains, servin()' to eonnect man with his ape-like progenitors, no one ~ill l~y mu:h ~~r:ss o~ this fact, who will read Sll.· C. Lyell's chscusswn,' m whiCh he shews that in all the vertebrate .classes the discovery of fossil remains has been an .extremely slow and fortuitous process. Nor should it be forgotten that those regions which are the most likely to afford remains connecting man with some extinct ape-like creature, have not as yet been searched by geologis:s. Lower Stages in the Genealogy of llfan.-vV e have seen that man appears to have diverged from the Catarhine or Old vVorld division of the Simiadre, after these had .diverged from the New World division. We will now endeayour to follow the more remote traces of his genealogy, trusting in the first place to the mutual affinities between the various classes and orders with some slight aid from the periods, as far as ascertained, 16 'Anthropological Review,' April, 1867, p. 236. 1 , 7 'Elements of Geology,' 1865, p. 583-585. 'Antiquity of Man, 18u3, p. 145. · |
