Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/518

498 infant to the adult state, and from that to old age, and the loss again and again of every particle of matter which had entered previously into the composition of the body during its growth, and the substitution of new elements in their place, while the individual remains always the same, carries the analogy a step farther. But beyond this we cannot push the comparison. We cannot imagine this world to be a place of trial and moral discipline for any of the inferior animals, nor can any of them derive comfort and happiness from faith in a hereafter. To man alone is given this belief, so consonant to his reason, and so congenial to the religious sentiments implanted by nature in his soul, a doctrine which tends to raise him morally and intellectually in the scale of being, and the fruits of which are, therefore, most opposite in character to those which grow out of error and delusion.

The opponents of the theory of transmutation sometimes argue that, if there had been a passage by variation from the lower Primates to Man, the geologist ought ere this to have detected some fossil remains of the intermediate links of the chain. But what we have said respecting the absence of gradational forms between the recent and pliocene mammalia (p. 436), may serve to show the weakness in the present state of science of any argument based on such negative evidence, especially in the case of man, since we have not yet searched those pages of the great book of nature, in which alone we have any right to expect to find records of the missing links alluded to. The countries of the anthropomorphous apes are the tropical regions of Africa, and the islands of Borneo and Sumatra, lands which may be said to be quite unknown in reference to their pliocene and post-pliocene mammalia. Man is an old world type, and it is not in Brazil, the only equatorial region where ossiferous caverns have yet been explored, that the discovery, in a fossil state, of extinct forms allied to the human, could be looked for. Lund, a Danish