with them. Some varieties may take on a cerebral growth as widely different and as strongly individualized as frame structure. Man himself is a striking instance. The Negro, the Malay, the Mongolian, are almost precisely what they were five thousand years ago. The Bushman, the Hottentot, the Patagonian, and the Digger Indian are to-day not much above the animals about them; while the Caucasian has gone on in a wonderful advancement, leaving the other races in the same state of development in which they were when the Caucasian was no farther advanced than they. And here is perhaps the place to allude to the derisive objection to Darwinism, that it makes man an improved monkey. Darwin's theory certainly gives to both some vastly remote common ancestor; but it does not maintain the metamorphosis of one into the other. It does not suppose that man was once a gorilla. It supposes that from out of some of the differentiations of some animal form arose the first man-like creature, and that, gradually changing, like other animal forms, some of the varieties eventually evolved into apes and orangoutangs, to stop there and die out like hosts of other forms now extinct. But from some strongly individualized variety sprang, with more rapid and advancing growth, the primitive man, who has, under complex influences, differentiated into the so-called races of mankind. We talk of man as being something infinitely above all animals. There is a vast difference between the highest and lowest species of the genus homo. Were the race confined to those lowest species, we imagine that European and American pride of nature would go before a grievous fall. These constantly succeeding changes are supposed to have taken place during the whole time that this earth has been fitted for animal life,—a period of time so long that the human mind is unable to grasp it.
One objection to this theory, strongly insisted on, is the absence of any evidence of connecting links between man and the lower animals, or between the strongly defined demarcations of the animal orders. The answer to this is, that little is known of the whole earth: much of it is submerged now that was once above the waters and served for a dwelling-place for organized beings. A great deal is known of the sequence of forms which have been unearthed from their stony sepulchres. The negative evidence is as weighty as the positive. Besides this, millions of air-breathing animals die, without leaving anything behind them to mark their existence. Preyed upon by other animals, devoured at their death by myriads of insects, exposed to the action of destructive chemical agents, they soon decay, and leave no trace behind. Who ever finds the dead bodies of the thousands of animals and birds which perish yearly? Who finds the remains of the familiar creatures which frequent our woods and meadows? For one which is accidentally buried so as to resist the destructive forces of air and water, millions are resolved into their primitive elements, and are annihilated as structural forms. And yet, because in portions of the vast deposits of rock the remains of certain ancient forms are discovered, it is asked that the Darwinians should furnish a perfect progressive sequence of fossils to elucidate the theory, and prove it beyond dispute. Recent discoveries have brought to light human remains in caves, where they are associated with bones of extinct animals. That they are of very ancient origin is beyond doubt,—older than any civilization, as we understand the term. But even they are doubtless modern, when we take into consideration the time that the earth has been as it now is. How many thousands of ages has it taken the Niagara Falls to cut their way through the solid rock back from Ontario to Erie? It is highly probable that the earth has been approximately the same as it now is for many millions of years. Reaching still farther back into the past, before this state of comparative quiescence, can we not find adequate time
