between that of the anthropoid apes and that of the Neanderthal skull. Such an intermediate stage must have been passed through at some time or other, and the mid-Miocene is just about the time when one would naturally expect it to have existed. The fact that no bones of this man-like creature have yet been found militates very little against the argument, for in all cases the mammalian remains, which we actually possess from any particular stratum, are a mere tithe of the species which we know must have been living during the period when it was deposited. And, after all, the works of man (or of a man-like animal) are just as good evidence of his existence as his bones would be; for, as Sir John Lubbock rightly observes, the question is whether men then existed, not whether they had bones or not.
During the Pliocene period, the scent does not lie so well, and we seem to lose sight for a while of man's ancestry. Such gaps are common in the geological history, and need surprise no one, considering the necessarily fragmentary nature of the record, based as it is upon a few stray bones or bits of flint which may happen to escape destruction, and be afterward brought to light. Some cut bones, however, have actually been detected in Tuscan Pliocenes, and may possibly bear investigation. Professor Dawkins, it is true, objects that the presence of a piece of rude pottery together with the bones casts much doubt upon their authenticity. But Professor Capellini, their discoverer, now writes that Mr. Dawkins is mistaken in this particular, and that the pottery belongs to quite a different stratum from the bones. Other marked remains have been discovered in Pliocene strata elsewhere; and worked flints have been detected in the gravels of St. Prèst, which, however, are of doubtfully Pliocene age. Nevertheless, the ancestors of man must have gone on acquiring all the distinctive human features during this period, and especially gaining increased volume of brain. If we could find entire skeletons of our Miocene and Pliocene progenitors, analogy leads us to suppose that naturalists would arrange them as at least two, if not more, separate species of the genus Homo. Whether we should call them men or not is a mere matter of nomenclature; but that such links in the chain of evolution must then have existed seems to me indisputable.
In the Pleistocene period, we come at last upon undoubted traces of the existing specific man. The early Pleistocene strata show us no very certain evidence; but in the mid-Pleistocene we find the earliest indubitable flint flake, split by chipping, and very different in type from the workmanship of the supposed mid-Miocene man-like creature. In the later Pleistocene we get the well-known drift implements. Without fully accepting Professor Dawkins's argument that the drift-men were human beings of quite a modern type, one may at least admit that the remains prove them to have been really men of the actual species now living—men not much further removed from us than the Andamanese or the Digger Indians. Accordingly, we can not suppose that
