remained almost as great a mystery as before; for, at the outset, the new doctrine appeared to go no further than to point to the direction in which the trail of humanity was to be looked for.
In approaching the subject from the standpoint that the origin, history, and civilisation of Homo sapiens are not to be determined under a sui generis code of transcendentalism, which finds no place among the methods of research applicable to the pursuit of the natural sciences in general, the following general propositions deserve to be carefully pondered as reliable deductions, having the imprimatur of some of the most competent biologists and palæontologists of modern times. The object of these preliminary statements is to show that the principles and laws which govern the rest of the organic world, past and present, are equally applicable to Man, and that they are the only legitimate means of gaining any knowledge of the mystery of human existence.
Fossil Ancestors.
That all the higher animals, which form so conspicuous a feature of the animated world of to-day, are genetically connected by descent from common ancestors, may now be accepted as a settled dogma in biology. But the evidence on which this comprehensive generalisation is founded scarcely admits of experimental proof, because these ancestors are no longer in life, owing to the inexorable law which destines every individual organism, after a more or less limited period of existence, to return to the bosom of mother-earth. Hence, of the vast majority of these pre-existing parental organisms no traces are now to be found, so that the only means of knowing anything of their former existence and characteristics is by investigating certain casts or impressions of the bodies of a few individuals which, here and there, by a fortuitous combination of circumstances, have become permanently stereotyped in the crust of the globe. Such fossil remains, however, disclose little more than the outlines of their bodies and some petrified portions of their skeletons; but yet, in the hands of skilled palæontologists, they have been made to throw a flood of light on the problem now under consideration. To fully comprehend the doctrine
