Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/696

678 have preserved the visible stamp of the relative inferiority of the stock from which they were prematurely detached. We have to believe, in effect, that these three branches—Fuegians, Bushmen, and Tasmanians—so little elevated in their physical, intellectual, and moral traits, have gone and planted themselves so far away only because the unoccupied space opened out before them. Scouts for the rest of mankind, they have reached, step by step, the extreme limits of the habitable land. They must have occupied for the moment, at least, the parts of the intermediate space, but they could not resist the push of the stronger races, and they could not have survived to our time, except under the condition of restriction to a small area in the most remote tract of their original domain. There is nothing surprising in the fact that MM. Quatrefages and Hamy, having described the most ancient European race of which we have the skulls, that of Canstadt, should have found its analogies only among these same natives of the extreme south—the Bushmen and the Australians.

It will be seen that we are inclined to remove to the circumpolar regions of the north the probable cradle of primitive humanity. From there only could it have radiated as from a center, to spread into several continents at once, and to give rise to successive emigrations toward the south. This theory agrees best with the presumed course of the human races. It remains to be shown that it is equally in accord with the most authentic and most recent geological data, and that, besides man, it is applicable to the plants and animals which accompanied him, and which have continued to be most closely associated with him in the temperate regions which afterward became the seat of his civilizing power.

The general laws of geology favor this hypothesis in a remarkable manner. To make it seem probable, we have only to establish two essential points that will not be seriously contested by any geologist. One is, that the polar regions, which were covered with large trees, enjoyed a climate more temperate than that of Central Europe, and were habitable and fertile to the eightieth degree, underwent a slow and progressive cooling down till the middle of the Tertiary period. Thence refrigeration made rapid progress till the ice gained exclusive possession of the country south of them. Under such circumstances, man as well as the animals and plants would have to remove or perish—to emigrate step by step, or find himself reduced to a daily more precarious state of existence.

The second point is the relative stability of the existing continental masses, and of their distribution around a sea occupying the Arctic pole; while the other pole was occupied with a cap of land surrounded by an immense ocean. The importance of the Arctic pole in respect to the production of animals and plants, and to their migrations, and the nullity of the other hemisphere in relation to this feature, result from such a grouping. The essential point is, that there is nothing