Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 6.djvu/703

Rh excavations conducted by M. Edouard Dupont, under the auspices of the Belgian Government. The dental structure is a striking mean between the ordinary human type and that of the ape. Other Belgian and French caves have yielded similar remains, while on the other hand the remains of an ape (Dryopithecus fontani), with a dental structure strikingly anthropoid, were found in the upper Miocene beds of the Tertiary at Sansans, department of Gers, in Southern France. In the Trou de la Nanlette long bones of animals in many instances were split longitudinally, for the easy extraction of the marrow. They thus become interesting as early traits of human industry and habits. From the remains as yet found we infer the existence in Europe of a race originally rather ape-like, but progressing toward a build and culture in the complete sense human.

And this is in perfect consonance with the general progress of organic life during the long marches of the various geological eras. The present is thus the era of the highest types. We are still told by many, however, that although every thing in Nature—stone, plant, animal—is stamped with tokens of the law and proofs of the fact of gradual development, man, though equally with them a link in the chain of being—man, forsooth, must have come from the hand of his Creator immediately, and perfect from the first.

But let us not draw, from facts as yet comparatively few and very scattered, conclusions which the very first new discovery may reverse. And seeing how few are the human remains yet found in these ancient layers, it is not strange that many hesitate to follow those who already extend the principles of the Darwinian hypothesis to man, and find our very own brethren in the anthropoid apes—brethren sprung from a common ancestry, but immeasurably outstripped by us in the long, long course of a development begun in a previous geological era. But those who accept Darwinism as applied to the animal and vegetable kingdoms, implying as that theory does the progress of organic life from low to higher, from simple to more complex forms and functions—these can hardly resist the conclusion that man also, as to his physical part at least, is but a highly-developed member of the animal kingdom. And, so far as they go, the data of geology favor that view.

Although the anthropoid apes resemble man in structure more closely than they resemble their lower congeners, still the lowest men are far superior, in mental character at least, to these highest apes. And we insist that it is a legitimate subject of inquiry whether the wide chasm now separating the highest apes from the lowest men has existed from the beginning, or whether the spiritual powers of the latter have been developed from the rude beginnings of intellectuality in the former.

The indications are that the primeval man of Europe and his nearer descendants were of short stature. The popular notion, that the present generation is physically weaker and smaller than the primitive or ancient, is not only utterly unfounded, but there is abundant