Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/519

Rh naturalist, found in Brazil, not only extinct sloths and armadilloes, but extinct genera of fossil monkeys, but all of the American type, and, therefore, widely departing in their dentition and some other characters from the Primates of the old world.

At some future day, when many hundred species of extinct quadrumana may have been brought to light, the naturalist may speculate with advantage on this subject; at present we must be content to wait patiently, and not to allow our judgement respecting transmutation to be influenced by the want of evidence, which it would be contrary to analogy to look for in post-pliocene deposits in any districts, which as yet we have carefully examined. For, as we meet with extinct kangaroos and wombats in Australia, extinct llamas and sloths in South America, so in equatorial Africa, and in certain islands of the East Indian Archipelago, may we hope to meet hereafter with lost types of the anthropoid Primates, allied to the gorilla, chimpanzee, and orang-outang.

Europe, during the pliocene period, seems not to have enjoyed a climate fitting it to be the habitation of the quadrumanous mammalia; but we no sooner carry back our researches into miocene times, where plants and insects, like those of Oeninghen, and shells, like those of the faluns of the Loire, would imply a warmer temperature both of sea and land, than we begin to discover fossil apes and monkeys north of the Alps and Pyrenees. Among the few species already detected, two at least belong to the anthropomorphous class. One of these, the Dryopithecus of Lartet, a gibbon or long-armed ape, about equal to man in stature, was obtained in the year 1856 in the upper miocene strata at Sansan, near the foot of the Pyrenees in the South of France, and one bone of the same ape is reported to have been since procured from